Clearly Social Media Marketing has moved out of the shadows into a front and center position in every marketing agency’s pitch session.  I don’t think this evangelical embrace of social media is all positive for many corporations and small to medium sized businesses. We see so much dreck that’s being passed off as “social media marketing” being foisted on unsuspecting businesses.

Good Social Media Marketing is not throwing up quick profile on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube and having an intern start to push out a bunch of lousy content. Case in point, we talked with a client last week that wanted us to do exactly this and we told them no. End of story.

Great Social Media Marketing Campaigns Require these Elements:

1) Baseline understanding of and integrating Search Engine Optimization best practices with all Content, Platform Profiles and Web Site.

2) Setting up Google Analytics for ROI Analysis - if you don’t know where you started in terms of traffic, usability metrics you can’t measure a social media campaign.

3) Cross promoting social profiles to leverage content costs and to enable better content curation across the social web.

4) Building a social presence that is more than pushing out basic content. This may have been acceptable 12-18 months but it’s beyond the pale now.  This is about engagement.

5) It’s about call and response marketing. The wonderful underpinning of Gospel Music has always been “call and response” - a great Facebook marketing campaign necessitates comments on what’s being said on your fan page. You can’t let the conversation threads get pushed out without any dynamic interaction.

6) Measuring more than the number of Followers on Twitter, Likes via Facebook or the Number of Fans, number of Views of a YouTube account.  These metrics may have passed muster in the good old days but not now! You need to understand who is engaging with your brand by sharing, forwarding and/or moving your content to people they are connected with.  New Social Media Metrics:

• Who is engaging with you via social influence aggregators like Klout and Peer Index. The real value of your social network will be determined by who is following and engaging with your brand, especially those that can influence others.
• What actions are people taking in your social community that creates a lead, drives revenue opportunities or enables your brand to integrate CRM into your social stream. We called these “conversions” in the now ancient pre-Facebook days.
• Who isn’t connecting with your brand via the social web. Take a holistic look at your customer focus so you can understand who isn’t connecting with you. This makes a comment on your overall social media marketing strategy.

7) Identifying reasonable demonstrable goals for your campaign that dovetail with your organization. Key word in this sentence is reasonable. Social media marketing shouldn’t be siloed, it needs to be integrated with PR, Print, Broadcast and Online Advertising.  You must set up a way to break out social media marketing analysis to properly measure ROI.

8) Grasping the fundamental dynamics of social media. Social media marketing is a superb tool for local businesses. A restaurant as an example can dominate highly targeted keywords using a simple Google Business Profile and then dovetail a vibrant campaign with Facebook, YouTube and Twitter that enables communication with and empowering new and existing customers.

If your a big national brand, then localized marketing is not a fit. Your entire baseline SEO and content development and curation strategy has to be targeted much differently. A blog should be the epicenter of your social media marketing, with a social platform strategy that dovetails with your Blog and that drives brand engagement.

9) Understanding how to position your brand above the noise level in the marketplace. I would wager 20% of the accounts on Twitter are just bot accounts with no human interaction. Whether we like it or not this is a reality for the time being. You have to work hard to build a brand on Twitter to make yourself heard above the incessant babble on Twitter that passes for content. How? Simple, create and curate good content and engage with the community. Everything else will fall in place.

Our social media platform of choice is Twitter - click here to connect! No words were harmed in this Blog!