5 Key things to accelerate your social media success – are you doing them?
By Alex Blakeway | @AlexBlakeway
If you are looking to accelerate your business through social media these are 5 great starting points to become a social media rock star!
Set your vision and dream
Set out what is the dream, this should be something so big it seems nearly impossible to achieve. The vision should be inspiring and create a feeling of excitement and trepidation (like meeting President Trump in the lift). Don’t keep this to yourself – tell everyone in your organisation so they buy into your dream. To get senior exec engagement connect business benefits to your vision to demonstrate why it’s important!
Why is anyone interested in reading your posts?
(Thanks for sticking with me so far ☺) Just because you are passionate about your product/service this does not mean the rest of the world will share the same enthusiasm. Unless you truly understand the benefits and value your product/service brings you will always struggle with engagement. If your company has a kick arse value proposition, then you have rolled a six my friend and can pass onto number three!
Benchmark where you are today
Assumption is the mother of all F**k ups (Steven Seagal – Under Siege 2) How you are doing today? Stats are helpful but not as important as assessing the quality of your content. Now try something really scary!! Ask a good cross section of your followers. What do they think of your performance on social media? Ask for comments/suggestions and offer an incentive for people that reply, simple but insightful.
Have a social media strategy/plan
Join the dots between the dream and where you are today. This is not a long document that sits on your shiny MacBook never to be seen again! This only needs to be a couple of pages. This is where you detail the steps you need to take to be successful and give yourself realistic targets and KPI’s. The most important part of this step is to get executive sign off. Unless you have the backing/support for senior execs it’s very hard to execute as you will need resources and budget to execute.
Create great content
You can have the best plan in the world but without good content you are in trouble! What can you do? Obvious question is to ask your followers, what content would they find most useful? Do it from the eyes of a fan/follower rather than the corporate marketing department. Ask brand advocates into your office/factory for a half day and they would bite your arm off. Have a workshop show them around and send them away with some goodies. You will learn so much and wish you did this years ago! Now go and write great content!
All the above is common sense, however in practise every company has its own challenges. My friends at Digital Leadership Associates have a proven way to accelerate growth through social media. If you are unsure how to get the maxim benefit from social media feel free to get in touch and I will make an introduction.
