How to Adopt a S.M.A.R.T. Approach to Social Media
Hello my friends!!
I am so super excited to be writing my very first blog post under my new business brand ‘Smart Social Media Solutions’!! So what can you expect? I’ve never been one to beat around the bush and what I love about blogging is it gives me permission to ‘say it like it is’ so that’s exactly how I intend to blog: short, sharp, to the point, social media marketing tips that will benefit you in business. So I thought it was only fitting that I write my inaugural blog post on ‘How to Adopt a S.M.A.R.T. approach to Social Media!
SPECIFIC: Before even contemplating jumping on board the social media freight train, you must first establish, who you want as passengers (fans and followers) and 
what route you’re going to take (your strategy)?
Do you want fan and followers who:
* Are male, female, generation X, Y, Z, Baby Boomers, Empty Nesters?
* Are local, national or global?
* Have a high disposable income, budget conscious, bargain hunters?
Is your strategy to:
* Build brand awareness in the marketplace?
* Generate leads?
* Create and build a community of raving fans (brand evangelists)?
* Market research?
* All of the above?
The answers to these all-important questions really do form the basis of your social media success. If you spend the necessary time planning, it will make for a far more enjoyable journey!
MEASURABLE: I learned a very valuable business methodology many years ago “that that you can measure, you can manage”. There is no use in spinning your wheels, only to find you’re not getting any traction from your action!! There are a number of effective social media tools you can use to measure your social media success and ROI.
Here are a few of the top tools to investigate:
1. Facebook Insights
2. Klout
3. Social Mention
4. Hootsuite
5. Social media metric plugins for Google analytics
6. Tweetreach
ACTION-ORIENTATED: You need to view social media, no different to the telephone, if it rings, you either need to answer the call or get back to the caller ASAP. You 
can’t just ‘DO’ social media, like signing off on an ad in the paper, you have to ‘BE’ social. Here’s a staggering statistic ‘95% of all the fan pages in the world have less than 20 fans’. Build it and they will come only happens in the movies. You need to be actively looking for opportunities to contribute quality content and conversation within the social community.
RELEVANT: If you’ve spent the necessary time being strategic with who your target audience is (customer demographics), you’ll find it much easier to post content that is deemed relevant within the community and you’ll also find the community more ‘responsive’ (oh another R word!!) to your content and conversations. On the other hand, if your fan base demographics are too broad, you‘ll be forever trying to be everything to everyone and it will dilute your results and outcomes. You don’t want to be a square peg in a round hole!
TIMELY: Once again, when you know who your target audience is, you can time when you should be online. There is no use posting at 8:30am
if your target audiences are Mums and they’re off dropping the kids at school and are not online. Timing is everything. The same goes for responding to posts, tweets, comments etc. Your fan base will dwindle very quickly if they’re posting on your fan page and you’re not getting back to them in a timely fashion.
What other smart strategies do you use to succeed in social media? Please share them with us!
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Thanks for writing this entry. I very much enjoyed it. Keep up the awesome work, man!
Aw, this was a really great post. In theory I’d like to write like this also – taking time and real effort to make a good article… but what can I say… I procrastinate alot and never seem to get something done.
Hi Kylie – great post and great to see you back blogging! I love your comments about how you don’t just “do” social media and the SMART Acronym is fabulous – great advice!
Thanks Donna for your feedback, I value and appreciate your support