Social media for business requires planning.  With the right strategy, social media can help you maximize your marketing efforts, build long-term, trusting relationships with your clients and prospects, boost your visibility and credibility, while you share your expertise and valuable experience with the growing audience.  You can develop good friendships and business alliances and have fun in the process.

Without the right strategy, social networks can waste time and resources.  They can also be annoying, distracting, boring and irrelevant.  They can even damage your reputation and cost you business.

Before you venture into social networking for business, it’s important to develop your social media and content strategy.  Here are some questions and key points to help you get started and see how your business can leverage these new channels of communication and customer engagement:

1.  Social media purpose:  What objectives do you want to accomplish through social media?

Do you want to:

• extend your brand and grow your customer base?
• research your target market needs and trends?
• monitor customer feedback and your online reputation?
• increase traffic to your company website?
• build stronger relationships with existing customers to boost loyalty and referrals?
• improve customer service and buying experience?

You objectives will drive the choice of social networks, your online content and tools to measure your social media impact.

2.  Your Social Network:  Who should you be talking to?

• What is your target market?
• Which social networks do they belong to?
• How do you find your target market online?  (Check out Twellow http://www.twellow.com, Twibes http://www.twibes.com, Facebook and LinkedIn groups).
• Which experts, colleagues and possible referral partners in your field would you like to follow with an eye towards learning, collaborating, forming strategic alliances and join ventures?
• Who is your competition and what are they doing in social media?
• Which of your local contacts are also in social networks?  How can you nurture your existing relationships through social media?

3.  Market research:  What would your target market want from your social media content?

One of the big mistakes companies make in social media is constant pitching of their products or services.  Social networks are more like coffee shops where people gather to have conversations than highways with rows of billboards alongside.

Here’s a list of tactics and tools that can help you take a peek into the heads of your prospects and customers to better understand their needs:

• Listen to the conversations that are already happening in your area of business. Join in, comment, and share when appropriate.
• Use Twitter Search (http://search.twitter.com), FriendFeed (http://friendfeed.com), Google Alerts to monitor conversations around specific topics.
• Pay attention to the words people use to describe their needs when they complain, ask for help or advice.
• Ask people questions.  Invite your friends and followers to participate in the polls and surveys you create.
• Follow and learn what your competition is doing in social media.

4.  Social media content:  How do you plan to educate, entertain, engage, and influence your audience?

David Meerman Scott said, “Think like a publisher, not a marketer.”

• What messages do you want to communicate to your target market and why?
• What content types and formats will be used?
• How will you integrate your web content with other information channels you may be using, such as email marketing, press releases, ads, social media, etc.
• How will you organize your content?
• How will your audience find your content?
• What is your schedule for producing, updating and maintaining your content?
• What’s your editorial process?
• How do you measure the usefulness of your content to your business and your customers?

5.  Your social media capacity:  What resources does your business have to implement your social media strategy?

• Who will set up your social media profiles?
• Who will design your pages?
• Who will create the content?  Will it be original, aggregated, user-generated, or a combination?
• Who will manage your social media activity and maintain your social media profiles?
• How much time do you plan to spend on stetting up and managing social media, generating content, participating in conversations, responding to feedback?
• What systems will you create to ensure that your social media campaigns run smoothly?
• What’s your social media budget?

6.  Social media tools and resources:  What social media tools do you want to use?

There are plenty of social media tools and resource out there, but it doesn’t mean you need to use as many as you can.  Your choice of tools depends on your business objectives, target market needs, content strategy, your social media budget and available resources.

7.  Social Media Metrics:  How do you measure your social media impact?

In addition to your social media objectives and an implementation plan, you need to know if your social media efforts help you achieve your business goals and be able to adjust your strategy as needed.

What to measure and how to measure is a big topic in social media.  The list of metrics across several categories below can help you start thinking about your appropriate measurements:

Outreach:

• Number of posts and updates
• Number of new and returning visitors to your blogs and websites
• Number of friends, followers, members, RSS subscribers

Influence:

• Repeat visitors
• Followers of followers
• If your follower retweets your update, how many people can see it?-         Inbound links to your content from other websites and blogs
• Directory listings
• Referrals from social networks
• Number of republished links
• Retweets
• Technorati authority for blogs

Market research:

• Analysis of audience feedback for neutral, positive and negative attitudes and emotions
• Analysis of keywords that people use to tag your content on bookmarking sites
• Analysis of keywords people use to search for your content, products or services
• Customer reviews
• Surveys
• Complaints

Engagement:

• Number of bookmarked links or items saved to wishlists
• Content ratings, likes, favorites
• Time spent onsite
• Number of comments
• Number of questions
• Number of downloads
• Number of views
• Usage of widgets
• Click-through rate (CTR)
• Number of email subscriptions
• Number of RSS subscriptions
• New member registrations
• Number of purchases
• Number of recommendations

A great resource on how to measure social media is “Social Media Metrics:  How to Measure and Optimize Your Marketing Investment” (New Rules Social Media Series) by Jim Sterne.

This post is an excerpt from The Social Media Planning Guide, which you can get by signing up for my free Social Media & Content Strategy Kit.

Only connect!
That was the whole of her sermon.
Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted,
And human love will be seen at its height.
Live in fragments no longer.
Only connect…

~ E.M. Forester, “Howads End”

Our brains are social.  We have a special set of neurons, called “mirror” neurons, to help us with our human connections.  When we interact with others, the mirror neurons in the brain help us understand other people’s intentions, feelings, and emotions.  They enable us to empathize with others.

Recent studies demonstrate that mirror neurons are located in more areas of the human brain than previously thought.  The researchers recorded them in motor regions of the brain and also in areas involved in vision and memory.  Mirror neurons explain how we can get better at sports, for example, by watching others who are good at it.  Our mirror neurons in motor regions are at work even when we sit still and observe.  They also explain why we tend to mirror the body language of people who we like when we interact with them, which helps us build rapport.

Deep human connection may also cause our brains to synchronize.  In the Wired article “Good Connection Really Does Lead to Mind Meld,” Brandon Keim reports that brain scans of a speaker and listener showed their neural activity synchronizing during storytelling.  The more the story resonated with the participants, the more synchronization the researchers observed.  Scientists speculate that they may be able to see even stronger brain synchronization when people are engaged in deep conversations, a hypothesis that they plan to test.

Interestingly, when we are alone and bored, our brain tends to ruminate on the negative aspects of our lives. In contrast, social ties with like-minded individuals who share the same hopes and dreams positively correlate with success and well-being.

In another study, psychological scientists Matthias R. Mehl, Shannon E. Holleran, and C. Shelby Clark from the University of Arizona, along with Simine Vazire of Washington University in St. Louis investigated whether happy and unhappy people differ in the types of conversations they tend to engage in. Their findings suggest that the happy life is social and conversationally deep rather than solitary and superficial:

The happiest participants spent 25% less time alone and 70% more time talking than the unhappiest participants. In addition to the difference in the amount of social interactions happy and unhappy people had, there was also a difference in the types of conversations they took part in: The happiest participants had twice as many substantive conversations and one third as much small talk as the unhappiest participants.

Not only pleasant social interactions open our own minds to possibilities and help us see the world in a more positive light, social connections – friends, family, neighbors or colleagues – improve our odds of survival by 50 percent. Here is how low social interaction compares to more well-known risk factors:

• Equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day
• Equivalent to being an alcoholic
• More harmful than not exercising
• Twice as harmful as obesity

The take-away is that people crave connection, meaning, a sense of purpose and contribution.  It’s often easier to connect on a deeper level face-to-face.  But what practices nurture meaningful interactions and engagement online?  Here are a few ideas:

1. Be yourself.  Avoid sounding like a faceless corporate entity. Show vulnerability. Show your passion.
2. Be a connector, shine a spotlight on your social network friends, introduce people if you think they should meet.
3. Interview your social network friends for your blog or podcast and post the links to the interviews through social media channels.
4. Celebrate other people’s achievements and important occasions.
5. Ask people for advice and favors.  People like to help.  Helping others gives them a sense of autonomy and choice, which is a reward to the brain.
6. Use videos and audios to deepen the connection with your audience, activate the mirror neurons and synchronize the brains.
7. Ask open-ended questions: who, what, when, where, how, why, etc.
8. Add value to discussions through your comments and replies.
9. Host online chats and events where people can talk about a specific topic for a longer stretch of time.
10. Organize a local meetup or tweetup for your online friends to meet in person.
11. Encourage good tone and friendliness.  Be thoughtful about how your language comes across online. Avoid defensive and abrasive language. Remember that people can’t see your body language or hear the tone of your voice.
12. Apologize when you make a mistake.
13. Express gratitude and reciprocate when somebody does something nice for you.
14. Promptly resolve misunderstandings and conflicts.  Consider when a direct private message to a person may be more appropriate than a public comment.
15. Give support and encouragement.

What would you add to the list?

Source:  Dilbert by Scott Adams

Hat tip to Neuromarketing