You’ve Got a Social Media Plan…Now What?

Once you have a social media strategy in place, next comes actual execution. So how do you make the magic happen? Before you kick off, it’s helpful to keep these key considerations in mind when it comes to efficiently implementing your plan’s tactics in order to deliver on the objectives and goals of your program. No need to Google Search! The following five tips are just what you need to help get you going on the right foot.

Five Key Considerations When It Comes to Social Media Execution
From determining which channels to participate to effective monitoring, here are 5 helpful tips to get you started:

• Channel Determination. There are many social channels to choose from to publish your content. While most B2B clients tend to focus on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter – opportunity also exists on YouTube, Pinterest and Instagram – determining which channels to participate on very much depends on your goals and where your audience spends time. If you’re targeting professionals, you might focus on LinkedIn. If you’re targeting tech professionals, you might focus more on Facebook or YouTube. All social media platforms have different audiences and nuances that must be considered and understood as part of launching any social media program.

• Copy customization. Social media posts are not channel agnostic, so make sure tailor your content to suit each respective channel while being careful to use proper posting etiquette. It’s important to note that there are post guidelines of which to be mindful of. For example, there are character and social object size constraints across each channel. On Twitter the character limit is 270, and while Facebook and LinkedIn are nearly limitless, but that doesn’t mean a 64,000 character post is effective. For example, on LinkedIn, you’ve got 210 characters before you run the risk of losing your reader after the “read more” ellipses shows up.

• Consider your martech environment. Aligning marketing activities with sales can happen through social channels as well. It can be worth your while to explore a third-party solution (i.e. marketing automation platform or MAP) that offers social media channel management and connection to your CRM.  If you’re looking for seamless integration of lead generation campaigns, social media and CRM efforts, this is a great point to consider, as it closes the gap between your marketing and sales and allows important information such as email open rates to get passed along to the sales team.

• Expand your reach via hashtags. Hashtags allow your posts to add another level of visibility and become part of a larger conversation. By connecting your posts to a popular hashtag, you can ride the wave of that tag’s popularity and join the conversation around it; thus helping to spur social engagement. Hashtags live across all platforms, but are most effective with Twitter and Instagram. According to Sprout Social, tweets with hashtags had two times more engagement and 55% more retweets than those without.

• Don’t forget monitoring. Set aside a consistent time every day (or however frequent needed based on program and goals) to monitor what’s happening across your selected social media channels. Again, a third party social media management tool can offer dashboards featuring multiple channels and functionality regarding search, analysis and intelligence. For example, many offer scheduled daily update emails that can be sent based on hashtags or keywords that you’re following. Or, can be set up so notifications are sent when keywords or accounts are mentioned, when your post receives engagement, and more.

Properly preparing a social media plan and strategy using these points and knowing what KPIs to measure means you’ve done your homework and you’re well on your way to implementing your social media plan. If you still need some help with any of it, we’re here for you! Please reach out to me or anyone at OMS to talk further about social media strategy, planning and/or execution!

What has been the greatest challenge you’ve faced when executing a social media plan? Leave a comment or connect with us through LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook!

Author: Veronica Chaidez, Senior Account Manager