A Social Media Strategy, Part 2: Setting Targets

This month we continue our discussion on implementing a social-media (SM) strategy, turning our focus to establishing targets. When beginning to set targets, remember that most SM outlets are tuned to a business-to-consumer (B2C) audience, which is very different than your business-to-business (B2B) focus. In essence, with B2B you’re communicating with individuals who make decisions within an enterprise or business setting. This is vastly different to how companies deal with individual consumers. Aside from this critical difference, the steps toward creating an SM strategy are similar in nature and follow a fundamental marketing process.

Define your Target Audience

Who are you trying to reach via social media, and why and what do you expect the engagement to achieve? You’ll need to be specific when answering these questions; don’t muddy up the profile by trying to group different profiles into a single campaign. Be selective, because if you try to serve too many needs, you’ll not serve any of them very well, and will likely fail to develop a solid following.

Start the process by identifying the companies you feel would be your best SM targets. Draw from your current customer mix, and identify the key influencers within those businesses. Build a profile that creates a set of attributes you can use to compare against others within the industry, to best understand what might interest them and how they either fit within or outside of your SM objectives.

While looking for those individuals who have a positive impact on your business, don’t discount flipping the approach to find influencers who have a negative impact. For example, consider connecting with segments of your customer set that, by the nature of their involvement in their day-to-day activities, look for reasons to eliminate your product from their operation. How could you learn from them or shift their of thinking if you were able to engage them in a that delivered educational information in an informal ?

Within the profile, determine how you might best engage these individuals—Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. Your strategy must clearly identify for your execution team who the audience is, and what actions you intend to invoke via your SM feeds.

You also should determine the value of your followers, in terms of dollars. SM requires an investment—in real dollars, time and resources—that could be used in other areas of the business. So, attracting followers must result in connections that create value for your company. Try to determine the ROI for each SM effort, and focus on attracting followers that bring value.