If you haven’t started marketing your business on social media just yet, 2013 is your year to jump on board! We’ve created this beginners social media plan to help you hit the ground running. Let’s get started:

1. Create and Secure a Business Page/Username – Setting up a business page and username on the following “big four” social networks is crucial if you want people to easily find you:

• Twitter
• Pinterest
• LinkedIn
• Facebook

2. Start a Blog – Aside from obviously having presence on various social media sites, creating a blog also gives people the opportunity to learn more about, and interact with your company. Blogs are easy to create, can be quickly updated, and provide you with even more content to share on your social networks. Check out our post, Blog Wars: WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr – Which Platform Rules? to find the best blogging platform for you and your business.

3. Listen & Connect –  After you’ve set up your social networks, it’s time to “listen” to social conversations and build relationships. You can search for social conversations in the following places:

• Twitter Search – This is a great place to start your relationship with the Twitter community. You can type in a keyword, phrase or use a hashtag (#) in front of a word to find people who’re talking about subject matter that relates to your business.
• Facebook Search – Facebook search plays a second fiddle to Twitter search, but you can still find some great information in public posts.
• Pinterest – You can search thousands and thousands of pin boards for interesting content and find people who share your interests both personally and professionally.

It’s a good idea to find several contacts on the various social networks to build relationships with. Don’t feel like you have to converse right away. You can just follow for a while and see what’s being talked about. But, if you have something to add to the conversation, do it.

4. Share Content

Content plays a huge role in not only building an audience, but keeping one as well. Some of the content you can share on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Pinterest includes:

• Your own blog posts
• Customer testimonials
• FAQs
• Links to other interesting blog posts (provide attribution and proper source credit)
• Photos
• Live and recorded webinars
• Product and service updates
• eBooks
• Handbooks
• Quotes
• Questions
• Videos (YouTube is a great place to start)
• Industry articles

5. Stick with It

We all start social media marketing plans with the best intentions, but remember social media takes time and consistency to prove its worth. Results won’t happen overnight. Some ideas to sustain your social media marketing plan include:

• Respond to a least one social action daily. Whether you retweet a link, like or comment on a post or repin a picture, keeping your business in front of your audience is key to staying top of mind.
• Don’t give up after a week, or two or even three. Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither will your social media marketing plan. The social programs that have been successful over the last several years are ones that remain consistent.

6. Measure

It’s important to measure a number of elements of your social media marketing plan. Some measurement tools we like include:

• Facebook Insights (in the admin panel of your Facebook Page) – With Insights you can see how your individual posts are performing. You can also see who your target audience is and tailor content for them.
• LinkedIn Page Insights (under the insights tab on your company page) – The Page Insights on LinkedIn are a bit less robust than Facebook, but you’re still able to see critical data including page views, page visitor demographics and unique visitors.
• Twitter Counter – This tool allows you to see the performance of your Twitter account, as well as how your tweets are performing.
• PinReach – This tool provides analysis of your Pinterest account including repins, likes and followers. It even provides details about your audience including your influential followers.

7. Change as Needed

Part of your success includes analyzing what works, what doesn’t and making changes. What you do today might not work next month, so stay flexible and go with the flow.

You have the power to make your social media marketing plan as successful as it can be. We hope these tips help you get off to a great start!

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