Social media is an important component of your company’s marketing program. It helps you build and maintain relationships with current and future customers, enhances your customer service, and provides valuable social links that can help boost your search engine rankings.

While an effective social media campaign can be a marketing workhorse, it doesn’t happen by accident. You can’t just slap a Facebook page together and expect the world to beat a path to your door. Social media requires dedication as well as persistence, and it needs to be built on a solid foundation if it’s going to be successful.

If your business is interested in setting up a social media campaign that gets results, you’ve come to the right place.

Build Yourself a Strong Team
A common mistake that many marketers make is to assign responsibility for the company’s social media campaign to the youngsters – they’re on Twitter all the time, aren’t they?

The problem with this strategy is that there is a big difference between tweeting in personal life and effectively communicating on behalf of your company’s brand. You need to carefully evaluate your employee roster to determine who is best qualified to represent your company in a social media setting.

Specifically, you’re looking for social team members who

• Have basic writing and editing skills.
• Can take quality photos, and have at least basic photo editing skills.
• Know their way around the computer.
• Have a flexible enough work schedule to be able to respond to social media issues in real time.
• Possess the knowledge and maturity to effectively speak on your company’s behalf.

Think in Terms of Tactical Social Media Campaigns
A social media campaign actually consists of a series of smaller tactical campaigns that are designed to capitalize on timely opportunities or address pressing issues. Develop a tactical social media plan for each of your active social channels that includes your short-term objectives, team assignments, general content ideas, and the best methods of exploiting the particular features of each channel.

Carefully Choose the Most Effective Social Media Channels for Your Business
Contrary to popular opinion, there is no such thing as one perfect social media channel. To choose the best social channels for your particular business, you need to find out which social media channels your target market is spending the most time with. In addition to conducting a social media preference survey of your customers, you can set up social interaction reporting on your Google Analytics account to determine which social media channels are sending the most visitors to your website.

Create an Editorial Calendar
An editorial calendar can help your social media team stay on top of content delivery schedules. You can get as fancy and detailed as you wish, but some of the most important elements to track include content topic, keywords, media channels to be used, posting dates and times, any tie-in marketing efforts, due dates, and team assignments. For easy sharing among your social team members, create your editorial calendar on a Google Drive spreadsheet or look into the WordPress Editorial Calendar plug-in.

Develop and Maintain a Consistent Company Voice
Remember that each of your social media messages is being evaluated in terms of company voice as well as the actual words of the message. Develop a company voice that creates the mental image of a company that your audience would want to do business with. An effective company voice will reflect your company’s values as well as match the expectations of your customers.