Dec. 15 – Your Charlie Brown Social Media Strategy

December 15th, 2009 by Amanda

This is an entry in our daily Internet Marketing Advent Calendar series. Each day your favorite marketing elves Kasi and Amanda will focus on a new topic to get your internet marketing in order before the start of the new year.

The whole idea of this series is to start getting some ideas for your 2010 Internet Marketing strategy. Most of you probably have some type of social media initiative started at your company. Perhaps you have a LinkedIn profile from a few years ago, a Twitter account you updated a month ago with a blog post you wrote around the same time or maybe you have your hand in absolutely ever sort of social network you can get an account on. In either scenario, we are going to call that a Charlie Brown Social Media Strategy: the tools may or may not be set up but your actual goals and strategy are the parts that are missing.

Developing a Social Media Strategy

One of the first things you need to do is start by talking to your customers and people in your industry offline first. See what networks your community is already participating in and join them there. Don’t require your customers to join a special social networking site just to support you. The most important community to be a part of is the one your customers are using. You may be comfortable on MySpace but all the people you are trying to reach are on Facebook.

After you have decided which communities you are going to participate in you need to set company policies, goals and a real strategy on how you are going to meet those goals. Anything less than a real strategy is potentially just wasting your time and resources. Mashable has a good post, 10 Small Business Social Media Marketing Tips, that gives small businesses some examples of basic and advanced strategies. Try a few of those out and make a real strategy for 2010. Joining every Social Network in the world does not provide the value of having an actual actionable strategy for you to make plans and measure your results.

Read the rest of the Internet Marketing Advent Calendar