What To Do Get Your Social Media Marketing Plan In Order

Over the years, we’ve had the opportunity to talk to a lot of companies about how they got started on social media marketing.

We often hear that, especially small businesses, get started in fits and starts. One employee was good with platforms like Facebook and Twitter, so they were told to spend an hour or two a week using them. Another employee was good at writing, so they wrote a few blogs. Somebody might have taken some pictures once, but no one knows where they were saved….

Jumping in is a good way to get started with social media, but if you want to be effective, it helps to have a good plan. Here are some of the tips we’ve come up with after talking to companies who would like to get more strategic with a social media program that can reach a target audience and drive revenue:

1) Get your usernames and passwords in order

To start with, use an email that can be accessed by several users. Usually, this will be something like “[email protected]…” or “[email protected]…” – generic is good here, since you don’t want the address limited to just one person.

For many companies, whoever raised their hand to volunteer setting up an account on social media ended up linking the business account to their personal account, sometimes going as far as to link their personal email and use a simple, easy-to-remember password. Needless to say, that doesn’t help you avoid hacking and other problems that can crop up.

It’s important to create secure passwords and store them in a place like Meldium or Datavault – if somebody moves on from the company, you’ll still have full access to all of the relevant accounts. Services like Norton offer free password generators you can use to properly randomize each password.

Important: Remember to use different passwords for each social media site! The odds of somebody successfully hacking an account by brute force are extremely low if you use a long, complex password, but it’s not impossible – and using different passwords helps to limit the damage that could be done.

You’ll also want to change your passwords periodically – even if you keep things secure on your end, the social media site could get hacked, and regularly changing your password will help limit the damage from undiscovered hacks.

2) Claim your business listing on Google

Google’s My Business service allows you to claim a listing – essentially reserving a place in search results to display information about your company. This isn’t a big deal for social media itself, but once people start finding your messages, they’ll also start searching for more information about you – and it helps to be prepared for that.

Be sure to get this done as early as possible. Unlike most things Google does, there’s an added layer of verification here where they’ll either call you directly or send a letter to the physical location of your business. This could take up to several weeks, so don’t delay.

3) Gather your photos in one accessible place

Photos and videos are great for social media. This includes everything from professional photos to quick shots at events to simple, cheerful days at your office. Once you have these, put them in a single place where multiple people can access them – file-sharing systems like Dropbox and Basecamp are a good choice for this. Be sure to limit access to authorized users – but allowing easy access from the cloud ensures that everyone who needs access will have it.

At the same time, be sure to use proper naming conventions for your files. This will help people quickly and easily find the content they’re looking for – and will help avoid deleting older pictures simply because they had similar names. You’d be surprised how often I’ve heard stories about this – trust me, a little prep work now can save your company from a lot of trouble.

To make this easier, consider creating an easily-accessible style guide and teaching employees to reference it when they’re adding pictures. Once they get into the habit of checking it, you shouldn’t have any further trouble with file names.

Would you like your social media program to convert customers and deliver results? We can help! Social Media Marketing Services

If you don’t have these steps in place and you are using social media for your business, take the time to get these items in order. Though simple tasks, they can help you potential headaches and time consuming searches down the line!

Thanks for stopping by,

Laura

Breezy Hill Marketing is a Vermont Web Design and marketing company specializing in inbound marketing and social media marketing. We love social combining technical know-how with creative solutions to create successful social media programs for our clients.