Calvert Creative

Social media is how collaborative communication happens online. But even if you have an idea of what some of the tools are, you may wonder how on earth you will pick a starting point.

Set Goals
You can focus your social media time toward your business goals. If you want to keep up with industry standards, check your most-trusted colleagues (your heroes and mentors) and traditional industry resources (like print magazines or newsletters) to see if they publish a blog or are hosting online forums in your field. If you want to keep an eye on your competition, find out what online directories and networks they are a part of, and join those groups yourself. Are you hoping to book your reception hall with more wedding parties? You might need to make wedding-related adwords a part of your social marketing strategy. Does your team need a way to work from different parts of the globe on the same project (without the emails and multiple versions of Word docs piling up)? Wikis were built for just such an application. Are you trying to enable interactive participation for a big event? Livestreaming and proprietary chat forums might be a part of the solution. Professional social media consultants can give you many ways to meet your business goals, and the first piece of information you’ll want to share is what exactly those goals are.

Listen
There’s already an online conversation about your brand, message, or industry, and you should be a part of it. These conversations are easy to find with a simple Google search. Even if your company doesn’t have a website, there’s talk – good, bad, and otherwise – about your industry. The people who are using social media the most are the young clients, entrepreneurs, and business leaders of tomorrow. Smart companies are already listening to these online influencers and communities, because once you understand the conversation, you are better prepared to join it.

Experiment
Fear no social media! While it’s true that not everyone should blog (or Twitter, or join Facebook, etc.) social media is usually easy to test out. If you have already named your goals, and have been listening to the online conversation, you will have a bit of an idea of what tools to test some things out with. Need online survey capability? Do an in-house, among friends test run with PollDaddy or SurveyMonkey. Want to keep your team informed about the progression of an event or project? Set up a private, in-house test blog. If it doesn’t work, ask for feedback so that you can either shift gears or scrap it and try something different.

Measure and Refine
Just about everything happening online can be measured. If you are trying to convince advertisers to buy ad space on your online property, you should (at the very least) be able to tell people exactly how many people visit your site on a daily basis. If you are trying to become a thought leader in your field, you should (at the very least) be monitoring how many times your work or message is being picked up, published, or talked about on the web. There are dozens of good tools out there for businesses, and you can choose based on the size and scope of your web properties and activity. You should measure the effectiveness of your social media experiments based on how well they helped you meet your goals so that you can refine over time.

Get going!
The main thing is simply to begin learning now. Social media has some powerful capabilities, and the sooner your business begins to put some social media muscle behind its goals, the sooner you will see real change begin to happen. Even if it feels a little new right now, you’ll become more skilled, and you will add a valuable resource to the power behind your company’s mission.