Tips for a Successful Social Media Plan

By Erica Freeze

In today’s technologically advanced society, more companies are incorporating social media into their marketing and communications plans. For a company’s social media platform to gain attention, strategists should devise a social media plan. Every interaction that is made on social networks should work towards the organization goals. The more time and effort spent on a social media plan, the more effective it will be in its implementation. If your employer asks you to generate a social media plan, here are five ways tips to consider to ensure its success:

Step 1: Define social media objectives and goals

Establishing plan objectives allows you to make changes to your social media campaigns and platforms if they are not coinciding with your goals. Goals need to be established to gauge the overall success of the campaign. When setting your campaign goals, think of the acronym, “S.M.A.R.T.” This acronym is a great way to remember that your goals should be “specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound.” Some examples of goals may be: increasing company awareness, increasing sales or increasing visitor loyalty. The goal is important to establish because it is the driving force of a social media plan.

Step 2: Conduct a social media audit

A social media audit is a process of analyzing what is working and what is not across your company’s social media platforms. When first starting your audit, take note of post frequency and follower interactions on each channel. From this, you can compare how your numbers change each month or each year. You can determine which platforms are worth keeping, enhancing or disregarding.

Step 3: Construct a content strategy

Creating a timeline and planning the content to post is helpful in the organization and originality of each platform. Cater your content to your company image, your audience, and the platform. An example: Should we post something funny or more serious? Should a video or a status be posted? Once your content is established, you can decide how frequently to post it on each platform. There are many studies that provide useful information about optimal posting times for each medium. Finding the perfect frequency to post can generate more engagement for your content.

Step 4: Engagement

It is important to see how your followers engage with your content on each platform. Keep track of how well each post is doing on likes, shares, and comments. Be on top of both negative and positive feedback. Instead of deleting negative comments, try to turn the customer’s perception around with positive advice and understanding. Showing that you care about your customers on social media can attract more followers and enhance customer loyalty.

Step 5: Evaluate and Alter your Plan

After you have implemented your plan, you should watch for what is working and what is not. You can use an analytics tool such as Google Analytics to provide data on website traffic. Once you see which content is driving the most traffic, you can apply this awareness to new posts. Because social media is constantly growing and changing, it is important to frequently analyze your successes and failures. From this, you can reconstruct your social media plan to best benefit your organization.

 

 

Don’t Let Social Media Stop you From Getting a Job

By Arunima Bhattacharjee

 

Last night’s party was a blast! You and your friends drank and today, you decided to share all of those pictures and videos on your social media: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc. Your friends will have a great laugh, people will see how crazy you were at the party and everything will remain a memory. Until one day when you apply for a job, and your recruiting employer decides to check your social media. When they see all your pictures from that night, they will either think you are a very social person or they might actually reject you based on what you did in the past.

Social media is a great place for employers to learn more about a potential candidate. About 93 percent of recruiters check the social media profiles of prospective candidates before they make a decision to hire them. And sometimes, what they find can be a major factor in hiring that person or not. A survey conducted by CareerBuilder with 2,200 hiring human resource managers found that 48 percent of hiring managers didn’t hire a candidate based on what they found on their social media.

Now I am quite positive that you don’t want to be that person who gets rejected from a job because of something you posted on social media. Therefore, here are some tips that can help you brand yourself on social media:

Identifying your brand
From the moment you went on cyberspace you formed your own brand. Google yourself, know what’s coming up when you search your name. The privacy settings on Facebook changes often, so be cautious of what is public and what isn’t. Therefore model a good positive behavior. If you want to impulsively post and share things, do it with positive intentions.

Be Real
Your employer wants to know if you’re really the person you say you are, and social media is there to prove it to them. You don’t have to post things on Facebook or twitter to look more experienced or knowledgeable. You just have to be you (without the drunken pictures of course.)

What you write on social media matters
If you had a bad experience at a previous job, don’t write about it on social media. The hiring manager for your current job prospect will definitely not appreciate what you had to write about your previous employers, and that might put you at risk to getting the job. These 10 people lost their jobs because of something they posted on social media. You don’t want to be them before you even get the job.

Social media is filled with information about all of us. You don’t have to be fake to make yourself look appealing to the job recruiter. However, be conscious about what you post on your Facebook or Twitter. Just be yourself and don’t over exaggerate about your abilities or change your name to provide more security to your private life. Employers will like it if you do have social media because it proves you are up-to-date with the internet and obviously because you have a social life. So go out there into cyberspace and fix what needs fixing.