Create the most effective social media strategy through balance and integration
Editor’s note: This post is sponsored by PartnerUp.
Social media strategies come in all shapes and sizes. Some companies choose one social media tool and stick with it, while others try their hand at everything. Neither route, however, will give you the results that an integrated and well-balanced strategy can provide.
A well-balanced strategy should give you both depth and breadth. The various platforms that you choose to work with should also be distinct. For example, Twitter will enable you to reach a wide variety of followers through its platform based on short 140-character messages. At the same time, a privately-branded community enables you to zero in on a more targeted audience and engage in deeper conversations. The key to utilizing the multiple arms of your social media strategy most effectively, however, lies in their integration.
When incorporating the pieces together, consider how each arm will tie in to the others in some way, shape or form. Creating links between the arms is necessary and the most important part of integration. Linking to your community from your Facebook fan page is a perfect example, but linking isn’t the only way to support the other platforms in your strategy. You could also do something like grab a topic that’s been covered deeply on your private community and take it to LinkedIn groups for further discussion.
Another part of integration is understanding that some branches of your strategy are going to require a greater amount of attention than others. A tool like Twitter requires very little time, while a private community necessitates a deep commitment to fostering long-lasting relationships with customers. That doesn’t mean that one tool is more or less important than another. They just serve different purposes.
With all of the social media tools available these days, there are a ton of routes a company could choose to go with its strategy. But the point that really needs to be hammered home here is that those companies that focus on the two, three or four tools that are right for them and find appropriate ways to enable each tool to support another will get more out of their social media efforts than those companies that hug the edges and either try to do everything or concentrate only on one thing.
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