How To: Develop A Social Media Plan

Having a social media plan for your business is important and is a way for you to build traffic to your website as well as grow your company. If you don’t have a social media plan then this article is just for you. I wanted to share this with my readers as a way of giving back or paying it forward to other business owners.

The key point to develop a social media plan for a business is to make sure that you don’t get overwhelmed or over plan your efforts. One of the best ways to do this is to document your efforts by testing, tracking and refining the tasks that you create as part of your plan.

• Determine documentation tracking tools. Choose software that you are comfortable using on a daily basis as you test, track & refine your plan.
• Research social media website. Review the different social media websites to see which ones works best for your industry. Define which social media websites you will add to your plan. Start with only two so that you don’t overwhelm yourself.
• Ascertain what you will track. As part of your social media plan, determine what you will track in order to define your success factors. Some of the common things that you can track is the number of followers, number of messages that you share, the number of people who click on your shared links, etc.
• Test your theories. To help determine what will work for you, test different ways of communicating your information via the social media website. Such as on Facebook, you can see how sharing your information as a note versus a link works for getting people to click on your links.
• Finalize your plan. Once you have tracked and tested your theories of what will work as part of your social media plan, then it’s time to finalize your plan. After a period of time, you should have figured out what works and what doesn’t during the tracking and testing phase. Now you are ready to incorporate those things that worked well into your social media plan as ongoing tasks.

Sound off: What have you tried that worked for you while you were developing a social media plan? Please feel free to share.

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