9 Steps to Your Social Strategy: Step 1 - Purpose

9 Steps to Your Social Strategy - Step 1: State your online purpose. 

Before your business should start posting you should define why you want to use social media, and why you want followers. Defining your online purpose will then become the perspective you will be doing all of your digital marketing work from. 

Here are some great examples of an online purpose: 

• Increasing sales 
• To be seen as the "go to" for specific topics
• Complimenting traditional customer service
• To increase traffic in retail locations 
• To improve communication between clients, staff or suppliers

Now write down a few ideas for yours, make sure they are attainable! 

Now that we have a few ideas for your online marketing social strategy, we are now going to look at why customers would want to follow YOU. For example, if your online purpose was to become an industry expert, once you define the industry you want to be an expert in, you answer why people will want to follow you! 

Next, if we want to increase sales or increase traffic to your website or blog, there are effective ways of doing so. To do so, we want to entice your target market to follow you online, we can achieve that by posting relevant information to your industry, you wan this information to essentially be "infotainment". This can come in the form of pictures, videos or articles. Generally you want your posts to also have link going back to your website or blog, these links are called incoming links, as they are leading the customer to your website. A great rule of thumb is that if you were to post six times in a week, five of the posts should be "infotainment", and the sixth post can be more of a hard sell for your product or service. 

Image Source:
http://blog.timesunion.com/opinion/get-all-the-news-unedited-uncurated/10484/twitter-bird-yelling/

Now that we have laid out the foundation for social media posting we can move on to using social media as a medium for communicating with clients, staff or suppliers. Why would you want this as part of your online marketing purpose? Using social media to communicate effectively to clients, staff or suppliers is basically word of mouth on steroids! How so? Well, as your current followers engage with your posts, everyone who is connected to them witnesses their engagement.  If someone states that the article you just forwarded is AWESOME, their followers will see it, and you have a higher possibility of catching their attention. Also, aside from being one the fastest ways for you to communicate with your clients, staff or suppliers, it is also one of the most cost effective ways! 

Now that we have covered the basics of defining your online purpose, you should now be able to come up with one for your business or community! After that you will be ready for Step 2 - Determining what Keywords or hashtags you will be using!