Task Force
Looking for the secret to using social media to your advantage? Don’t do anything without examining how it can help achieve your core business objectives. Amy McCulloch and Kate Ross from digital marketing agency eight&four share four simple steps to help you implement a successful social media strategy…
Step 1 – Select a social media champion
Select someone who people recognise as being linked to your business, someone who you’d feel comfortable with as the voice of your business, and of course someone who is a creative thinker!
Step 2 – Set social media objectives based on your core business objectives
Formulate social media goals by considering how it can help to achieve business objectives. We split these into four parts: your revenue, your brand, your clients and your people. For example, under the client section, an aim might be to improve customer care after appointments. Therefore, your social media target would be to use social platforms to follow up with clients and receive feedback. These focal points can be sent quickly and give you a sound basis for developing your social media tactics.
Step 3 – Develop and implement social media tactics
So, you’ve got your objectives, what are you going to do to meet them? Try searching for hair and beauty trending topics on Twitter and be the first to comment on them, positioning your salon and your brand as a thought-leader, or upload videos to YouTube to help promote and showcase your apprenticeship programme, encouraging recruitment of juniors. Use Facebook to follow up with clients after their appointments, or run social media specific promotions across your networks, such as ‘book online now using the code SOCIAL2011 to receive a free conditioning treatment’.
Step 4 – Measure success and evaluate
There’s no point in putting all this time and effort into social media without inputting benchmarks and developing a concept of what it is to succeed in social media. Keep a weekly record of views, comments, retweets, followers, fans and so on, while logging which activity created the most interaction or feedback. Start developing an idea of the types of communication you put out and which is most popular among your network. Then use this information to help inform your social media tactics! Also, consider how much traffic you’re driving from social media platforms back to your website.
Most importantly, ask yourself if the tactics have helped you meet your wider business objectives – have you received more feedback, increased bookings or helped position your business as an industry thought-leader? A true evaluation process will go back to the grass roots of your programme to assess whether your efforts have been worthwhile, what improvements could be made and where you found the most success.
Find Amy McCulloch and Kate Ross at eight&four
