Creating Your Social Networking Marketing Plan

Social networking is a valuable part of a marketing plan. It’s a great tool to build your business through knowledge, connections, improving your credibility in your industry, building your brand and broadening awareness of you and your business.

In order to make the most of your social networking efforts, begin first by planning and integrating it into your current marketing strategy.

Question #1  What Are Your Social Networking Goals?

For many, their social networking strategy evolves around building relationships – and there are many different relationships social networking can create and build including:

• Joint venture partnerships.
  
• Vendors relationships
  
• Mentoring relationships
  
• Friends and resources.
  
• Customers.
  
• Prospects
  

• Increase awareness
  
• Increase your personal credibility
  
• Connect with experts in your industry
  
• Drive blog or website traffic
  

Question #2  Who is your target audience?

It’s important to know this before you begin participating on social networking sites so you choose the sites which are right for your business and your goals.

Question #3  What do you have to offer your audience?

What information are you going to offer and how are you going to participate?  Are you going to link to blog posts?  Post tips and information? 

Question #4  What social networking sites cater to your audience?

This step will involve a bit of research and some time, you can also outsource this research time to a virtual assistant.  

Question #5  How often are you going to post/participate? 

Create a realistic plan for posting and participating in your chosen social networking sites and schedule it into your day/week/month. 

Question #6  How are you going to test and track your social networking efforts?

Like any effective  marketing effort it’s important to test and track your efforts.  This can be accomplished by sending followers to test pages, installing analytics on your sites so you know where people are coming from and by creating promotions and posts specifically for your social networking associates.

Question #7 Cross Promotion

How will you promote your social networking efforts and conversely how will you promote your business, website, blog and so on?  There are a number of widgets and plug ins, for example wordpress offers a widget and twittip.com offers a number of buttons you can install on your webpage or blog. 

The key to social networking success is to create a marketing strategy with clear goals and steps to take to attain your goals.  Post regularly, be authentic and transparent, provide value and embrace the knowledge, opinions, and resources available through social networking.   In the new age of Internet Marketing it’s all about community and personality – you are your brand and social networking is a valuable way to share it with the world.

Happy Networking!