5 Steps to a Social Marketing Plan for 2010

Tips for Baby Boomers in Business:

* Startup marketing

* SEO copywriting/content

* Online marketing trends

A social marketing plan is part of your overall marketing strategy, and as such must be tailored to your specific needs. But various forms of social marketing can eat up a lot of your time unless you carefully target your goals. In order to do that, you’ll need to:

1.   Create a presence.

You can do this at no cost. Linked In, the social site for professionals, is a good place to start, precisely because, besides giving you a free page that links to your Web site and blog, it is fundamental to establishing your credibility yet, once set up, does not require much in the way of updating. 

The exercise of setting up your page is much like writing a resume – not much fun, but worth the effort. In addition to trumpeting your experience, the site helps you learn to pack a lot of information into very few words by answering the question, What are you doing? As you answer – and update – this question, be sure to use your keywords.

2.   Make a schedule you can stick to.

Remember to make a schedule for tweeting on Twitter.com – both because you don’t want to forget and lose your online presence, and because you don’t want tweeting to be the only thing you accomplish all day.

3.   Provide good, engaging content.

Always be brief, direct and casually friendly in your marketing communications. Try to be as helpful as possible, and remember that the magic words are “you” and “free.” Dishware, toasters and matchbooks are so last century – so find something you can give away instead, even if it’s only a daily factoid, an interesting llink, a monthly eNewsletter, a quantity discount or a limited time offer.

A large part of marketing is getting into the customer/client mindset. What are your Web site or blog visitors searching for? What is the problem you can solve for them? If you go there, your marketing communications will be more successful.

4.   Do your keyword research.

A good way to get into the customer/client/patient mindset is to use a keyword tool such as Google’s (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal). The exercise of finding out what people are searching for will go a long way toward answering the question: What do your visitors need? (More about keywords in a future post.)

5.   Be consistent in your delivery.

Get your social marketing plan in writing and refer to it frequently – at least weekly – to be sure that your efforts remain in the category of “effective,” and don’t slop over into the zone of “inefficient time-eaters.”

Tweeting, like blogging, takes a real commitment to refreshing content and establishing a strong online presence. So, why not do these activities together? When you complete a blog post, tweet a link to your post with an inviting short statement (e.g., 10 Ways to Maintain Good Health + url). Likewise, your blog can provide ideas for more tweets.

A good rule of thumb is 2-3 blogs per week, with the best days to post being Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. It’s also valuable to reply to other tweets and to retweet interesting tweets for your followers, as well as to comment on other blogs and tweets. For twitter, you really need to spend a few minutes each weekday. If you have someone who can handle tweeting for you, then the guideline is “the more, the merrier.”

Once you get beyond the newness of social marketing activities, you’ll see that connecting to people in this way can be very enjoyable, especially when you elicit responses, and you’ll receive at least as much as you give.