LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube… once only visited for personal use, these sites are now being used for business purposes. We all hear about them and see their icons everywhere. And, we feel out of touch or like we are dropping the ball if we don’t have profiles on all of them.

It is true that social media sites help business. But how? Most of the case studies we read about are about big business and their bigger than life social media campaigns. How can small business benefit?

The truth is—at least our opinion of it—that there are no step-by-step rules to follow as of now to guarantee success. What we do for our clients is to educate them about the possibilities for their specific business and industry to maximize their return on investment; whether it be time or an actual dollar commitment.

That’s where the Social Media Plan comes in. Before spending the time adding your company’s profile to any/all of these sites, you should think about the following:

1. Your goal. What is the specific goal you have in mind for social media? Is it to increase traffic to your corporate site? To create brand awareness? To promote a specific product or service? To increase your network? Your goal will help determine which sites make sense for you to participate in.

2. Your audience. What does your audience really want to know about your company? Don’t assume. Ask. You can send a well-crafted survey to your audience with specific questions so you can hit the ground running.

3. Your resources. Participating in social media takes time. You need to be consistent about publishing content several times a week. Do you have the internal resources to do so? Or, will you ned to hire out? And, what would that cost be?

Once you have thought about these 3 key items, you can be more specific about your plan. You need to answer the following questions:

• Which social media sites best match my goals and my audience?
• What kind of commitment will I make regarding publishing content to each of these sites?
• What resources (internal/external) will I use?
• What system(s) do I need to put in place to publish consistently?
• What type of content should I publish about given my goal and my audience?
• How will I track my efforts?
• When will I evaluate my tracking information?

Before you add a profile to a social media site and just have it sitting there wondering what the fuzz is about, plan it out.

If you need help, contact us. We can put together a social media plan you can implement on your own, with your current web developer, or with us.