Social networking and social media marketing is something that Amadeus Consulting specializes in strategizing for our clients, and we often get asked the question: What is the value? How can I really meaningfully use this? Should I set it and forget it? Believe it or not, having a strategic social media marketing strategy can have a huge impact on your company (rather than it being an intern’s task that never sees the light of day).

Unfortunately for many companies, lack of a strategy and understanding of the social media arena is where the Facebooks, LinkedIns and Twitters of the world become a fad, a blank profile in a crowded space.

So what are the Keys to Social Media Marketing? Goals, Metrics, Consistency & Maintenance. After reading a great article, "Social Media Analytics: Moving from Engagement to Measurement," by Michele Hinojosa and working out key strategies for our clients, we felt compelled to share the keys to the social media castle.

Goals

One of the biggest mistakes that people make with social media marketing is getting excited about it because many competitors and other businesses use it, but not building a framework and set of goals around it. This sort of ‘Keeping up with the Jones’s’ mindset can be dangerous because time and money can be wasted without much output or benefit. One of the critical questions you will need to answer in order to develop your strategy is:

What is the goal of using social media? You can pick multiple goals; the truth is that social media marketing can enhance many aspects of your business. Some of the typical goals for social media strategy include:

• Entering into the space with your competitors

• Passive brand awareness

• Active lead generation

• An outlet for your link building

• Engagement with customers

• Research

Metrics

How will you measure success? This is an on-going struggle in the marketing world. We get excited to try new avenues to market our organizations, but rarely determine metrics to gauge success. In Michele Hinojosa’s article, she discusses a few key ways to build metrics around your goals. Some of these ways include:

• Measuring within the network – Let’s take Facebook as the example. As Hinojosa says, (and you probably well know from the many hours spent on Facebook) you can measure the number of fans, number of comments, the number of posts or responses, or even the traffic to the Facebook page.

• Measuring against competitors – This is something that can be a great first step because goals are hard to identify in a space of 500 million. Take your top 3-5 competitors and see how many Twitter followers or Facebook fans they have. This can serve as the baseline for how many you want to have, but is not the end of the metric measurement.

• Traffic Back to Your Site – Tracking referred traffic to your site is one of the best ways to gauge the effectiveness of your marketing portfolio, but it can seem difficult to accomplish. What this really entails is a URL tracking strategy. This means utilizing URL shortening services bit.ly and creating tracking variables onto your actual URL.

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