What Are Your Social Media Marketing Expectations
From the Social Media Pundits to the Social Media Experts, it seems all will agree that Social Media Marketing takes some time to effectively implement. It is not a quick fix to a broken product, nor is it free. Much has been written about engagement, community, listen to the customer and so on, and while all of that is true, there is a method to the madness of a well executed Social Media Marketing Strategy. There is a clear and concise path and timeline for enhanced success. And, Guess what, It doesn’t start with Facebook or Twitter.
The folks over at Social Media Today did a nice job of outlining the various phases of a Digital Marketing Life Cycle, and they cover the specifics of each phase and the sequential path in that blog post.
What Should You Expect
We typically advise our clients that to deliver sustainable results, we need a year. That is a little scary for some businesses, and we understand that. The liner chart above is pretty spot on relative to what to expect regarding phasing. What we felt was missing, are numbers. While it is great to understand the phases, you also have to nail down the numbers, and they need to be numbers that are tied to your business.
Don’t Start With Facebook or Twitter
While we think Facebook and Twitter has value, it isn’t the place to start your Digital Marketing Campaign. If you have followed this blog, we believe that the backbone of a Social Media Marketing Plan for a Small Business is your blog, and the Content Plan that supports the blog. The sole purpose of your business blog is to increase traffic to your businesses web site.
That said, we start by building a blog following, and monthly visitors to each of our clients blogs that we manage. We don’t see tangible results, or “Traction” as outlined in the schedule bar above until the blog crosses the 2,000 visitors per month threshold, as when that happens, (not that that is a magical number) we start to see measurable movement in the amount of traffic that the parent web site is getting. And in all cases, as the web site traffic increases, sales rise accordingly.
So, while not always popular, we build Blog Traffic First, then start to think about Twitter and Facebook. What has your experience been?
Eric’s background is rooted in the rental and real estate industries. He founded metro Detroit’s Urbane Apartments in 2003, after serving as senior vice president for a major Midwest apartment developer. He established a proven track record of effectively repositioning existing rental properties in a way that added value for investors while enhancing the resident experience.
He also established The Urbane Way, a social media marketing and PR laboratory, where innovative marketing ideas are tested. Eric has been featured in Entrepreneur Magazine and Business Week Magazine.
You can connect with Eric_Urbane on Twitter.
Eric also writes regular articles for the following publications;
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