5 Important steps to consider before you launch a social media campaign

We often receive enquiries asking us what we can do for our potential clients with social media. While there's a multitude of things we can do, it is almost impossible to answer that question without understanding what our clients needs and wants. So here are six brief steps you should consider before you engage in a social media campaign.

1) Define your objectives

Deciding on a goal for your business will help you establish very early on what you want to get out of social media, and will help us establish how to build a campaign. It is important that the goals are established right from the off so that they can be kept in perspective at all stages. Your goals could be things such as driving more traffic to a website or increasing awareness, increasing followers etc.

2) Define what success means

You can only meaningfully measure success if you have established what your goals are, if the goals are to drive more traffic then we can measure this pretty easily through the site stats. We can get more sophisticated and measure a variety of user actions and engagements.

3) Know your positioning

Where do you stand with relation to your competitors? How do your audience perceive you at the moment.

4) Know your audience

This is essential to any communications campaign. Your products are often aimed specific audiences and the tone of the conversation and the formulation of the message often depends on your target audience.

5) Build a strategy

Answers to the above questions will help form a solid strategy for you to succeed in social media. Different media and channels offer different ways of communicating with your audience. For instance Facebook is a personal medium where relationships matter. So you must treat Facebook as a relationship building tool. Relationships are about conversations and engaging your audience. You must be ready to offer something to your audience that they will want and spread to their friends, this could be a prize, a link, some kind of rich media. There are more factors to consider such as frequency, language etc. You can find out more about Brands, Contexts and Social Networks from a previous blog post.