How to Start Building a Social Business Strategy

photo by: Kai Design & Communications

I’ve been busy over the last few weeks with a new project that my “Social Plus” pal Sandy Sidhu and I created under the banner: Build Social Business.

Our goal is to help entrepreneurs, consultants and small to medium sized businesses create social strategies based on their business goals; not just their marketing needs.

This week, we launched the project with our first workshop: Build a Better Business Through Social Media.

The workshop validated what our research had shown were the 3 top challenges faced by small business when trying to integrate social media:

Lack of Time
Lack of knowledge
Lack of resources

The purpose of the workshop was to help the participants create a social business strategy by giving them the tools to assess their current situation and an overview of resources available.

Each business has to decide which platform and tools best serves their overall business goals.

Sandy and I come to social media from the business sector; she from technology, I from the service and non-profits sectors. Though social media plays an important role in marketing, our emphasis is the integration of social into the entire business culture.

Where to start?

1. Start By Listening

When deciding which 3 platforms would make sense to use for your business…

Observe how people are engaging on the particular platforms.
What are your industry peers doing? - For example, on Twitter find tweet chats that are relevant to your business (where you can share your expertise, get in front of your audience).

Use the search functions of each platform to find people talking about the types of problems your products/services solve.

Set up Google Alerts for your business, yourself, and keywords prominent in your industry.

2. Develop your Content Strategy:

Once you have identified the platforms you will use, start working on engaging and sharing content.

If you’re starting with a blog, have several posts ready before you go live.You don’t have to start right away with creating original material. You can re-purpose old articles (that are still relevant), press releases, profiles, videos etc. You can also be a content curator. Share links to articles and online resources that you think your followers would find helpful.

Mix up the media. Visual is important to all platforms especially Pinterest, Google+ and Facebook. And don’t forget about audio. Podcasts are relatively easy do produce and very popular.

Whether a blog, Facebook or Twitter, it’s always a good idea to have an editorial calendar. Nothing worse than starting the day without a clue what to write/video/tweet. (Believe me!)

Include calls to action on whatever platform you’re on if you want to drive conversation, conversions and click-through’s to your site.

3. Evaluation:

You can’t know where you’re going if you don’t know where you are.

Assessment is basically finding answers to a whole lot of questions.

Once you established you KPI (Key Performance Indicators) and time frames (Ex. every three or six months), you can estimate how you’re doing by using:

Google Analytics: – most visited pages, top keywords used, unique visitors, top referral sites

Facebook Insights (EdgeRank): Lifetime Reach and Post Date and Time, Engagement,Talking About…

Twitter Analytics: Number of ReTweets, mentions, “sentiment analysis,” etc.

By studying these, you can establish which strategies are working and which you might want to tweak or drop altogether.

What targets are engaged? Which segments do you need to engage/approach differently?

How many consulting inquiries or product sales after “x” months

Building a social strategy is a long term exercise. Like all exercise, you only get out of it what you put in.

What’s your biggest social business challenge?

Sandy’s new eBook: From Stuck to Unstoppable: How to go from Idea to Launch [Kindle Edition] is available at Amazon.com.

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About Ray Hiltz

Ray Hiltz is a Social Media Strategist with management roots in restaurant, hotel and performing arts. A strong proponent for the power of collaborative communication and "humanized" digital networking, Ray writes about social media, social business and Google Plus. His clients include hotels, restaurants, consulting firms, entrepreneurs, writers and individuals just trying to make sense of "social". Ray is a popular speaker on Social Media, Social Business and Google+.

This entry was posted by Ray on July 20, 2012 at 15:42, and is filed under Social Business. Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0.You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

jureklepic

2 Like

Ray Hi.

One things business should understand that is building strategy based on their competitors is not a strategy. If business want to win in the future they need to stop competing with others. The only way to beat the competition is to stop trying to beat the competition. I often say that there is no such thing as marketing strategy any more.

Great read. Lets connect soon Ray!

Latest blog post: It’s Time to Stop Focusing on New Technologies

snouraini

1 Like

@jureklepic So well said Jure! It is more important to find what makes you unique. This new age of social media requires such a huge culture change!

Latest blog post: Hello world! | Nice day for a Doten Clone

newraycom

2 Like

@snouraini @jureklepic ...And that's precisely why it is so challenging developing business strategies for companies to integrate social networks and tools.

It's more an exercise in change management that social media management.

We're asking people to change they way they do business when they think all they are doing is changing the way they do advertising.

Thanks for dropping by, Sherry. Another hangout soon? :-) (of course, you're invited Jure)

snouraini

1 Like

@jureklepic @newraycom Just sent out a couple of times through tungle (what a cool tool!). Feel free to propose other times. Looking forward to it!

Latest blog post: Hello world! | Nice day for a Doten Clone

jureklepic

2 Like

@snouraini @newraycom i am open to anything guys. lets tungle and set up something. Here is my tungel guys so you can see when i am free... It's sync with my google calendar... http://www.tungle.me/jureklepic and lets pick up the time :)

Latest blog post: It’s Time to Stop Focusing on New Technologies

snouraini

2 Like

@newraycom @jureklepic Definitely, we have to meet and plan a workshop for you for one of these Fridays (Open Social Media initiative), that is if you are interested. An of course, having Jure attend would be a treat!

Latest blog post: Hello world! | Nice day for a Doten Clone

newraycom

@jureklepic Thanks for dropping by, Jure.

You can't focus on where you're going if you're keeping your eyes on where everyone else is.

I'm interested in hearing why you think there's no such thing as marketing strategy anymore.

If you mean it in the sense that your whole business is "marketing" then I can see you point.

Marketing has to be integral to all facets of the business.

Many times, the marketing arm of a company was virtually "arms length".

Perhaps we can do a hangout and dig into this a bit deeper.

Cheers.

12 comments

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richmac

Sounds like a very worthy project Ray! You would have a lot of material to take a deeper dive just with these three key points! One thing that is often overlooked is how interconnected points one and two are. Many businesses sell themselves short in the content development category. Listening forms the basis for engagement on the big platforms, but it also provides the direction for what content should be developed. If a business assembled its team (maybe emphasizing the customer-facing employees' role in developing content), they could brainstorm for 30 minutes and easily identify 50 to 100 of the common questions their clients and prospects ask. The answers will usually provide enough content for blogs, articles, case studies and virtually any content format they could think of. This type of exercise also reinforces the cultural commitment to being social because everyone has a hand in it.

Keep us posted on your progress with this - although I know you already plan to! ;-)

@richmac Thanks for the feedback, Rich.

Your point on listening being integral to good content management strategy is very important and deserves its own article. (I look forward to reading it ;-)

The first commandment of social is Thou shalt listen. Without listening to what your followers are saying, you're just broadcasting your own news.

And yes, I will keep you posted...

iMuriente

This is exactly what I do to help my clients. We are on the same page...awesome! Thanks for validating what I do! Sometimes IT people and others do not see value in Social Media action and those who do it. I know one day they'll need it...if they ever want to expand their business' horizons! :)

@iMuriente Happy to validate:-) No matter what industry, some people get "social", others don't. My goal is to work with people that "get it."

Great project Ray! You are absolutely correct, social media is more than just marketing.

Let's Stay in Touch.

My personal G+ Profile

My G+ Business Page

How to Start Building a Social Business Strategy

Lack of Time Lack of knowledge Lack of resources

Where to start?

1. Start By Listening

2. Develop your Content Strategy:

3. Evaluation:

About Ray Hiltz

Let's Stay in Touch.

My personal G+ Profile

My G+ Business Page

Lack of Time
Lack of knowledge
Lack of resources