TALKING, is a social media management framework to help shape and champion social media plans. It gives rise to healthy discussions about social media strategy and management issues. Below we’ll explore the 7 elements of the TALKING framework to help you effectively manage your social media marketing.
1. Tribes
Define and build your segments and personas.
People are part of tribes of like-minded people who are connected and share goals and interests. So before you dive into your marketing strategy, it’s important to keep in mind that you’re targeting people – not segments. Creating personas will help you find the hooks and challenges in their lives that your product or service can address.
2. Activities
Understand their activities.
After identifying your personas you will be able to better understand what they are doing online. Do your target audience maintain a profile on social media sites like LinkedIn or Facebook (joiners), read blogs or watch videos (spectators), post reviews (critics), create content, or spend their time on social media at all?
3. Listening
Understand the conversation landscape.
You need to start listening once you know where the tribes you are targeting spend their time and which social media channels they are using. If you start talking at people with no background or introduction as to what interests them, then all you are doing is shouting in the middle of a crowd and will be ignored.
If you’re stuck on what to do next, search for groups of influencers and see what they are talking about. Do research before deciding who it is you hope to engage with. Listening to what your competition is saying on their channels is also a great strategy.
Top tips:
- Use Google Trends to carefully map out the hooks and pain points you identified in your personas, and to brainstorm a calendar for social media conversations.
- Set up social monitoring tools to monitor the conversations based on your brand keywords, names and the pain points of your target audience.
4. KPIs
Key Performance Indicators: measuring your efforts.
Compared to the other scales of a business, social media often gets less attention. However it’s important that it’s measured.
You need to show that your social media strategy will make a positive difference to the bottom line. The only way to do so is to use metrics, but don’t be fooled by vanity metrics . A social media post that gets hundreds of likes may not translate into conversions, so start measuring social media performance through social media analytics tools.
5. Investment
Determine the resources necessary, technology that is appropriate, and time frames to implement.
Now you have an idea of what social media platforms your target audience use, you’ve listened to what they talk about, know who can influence the tribes, and how you are going to measure your efforts using metrics. It’s time to determine what level of investment you need from your company.
Social media marketing can be an extremely powerful, inexpensive way to get your message out. However, social media isn’t a “set and forget” strategy. So budget social media marketing into your business’s plans as you would any other form of advertising. Most businesses opt for one or all of the following: hiring staff members to manage and create posts; using a software program that will automatically post at preset intervals; hiring outside agencies for social campaigns.
6. Network
Find and start conversations with influencers.
Influencers, more than anything else, have the power to influence people’s opinion of your company. They can do great good by sharing your business with their followers or devastate them with a single misstep. Never underestimate just how much power they have – especially those that share only one post per day
In order to successfully use social media, you need to strategically find and interact with influencers. Use comments and conversations in a professional setting to improve your brand’s reputation. Successful influencers can inspire useful posts, which create an opportunity for you to deliver your content and amplify this through their networks. If you have listened to others, and put time into this, it will come across as organic instead of forced.
7. Goals
Set SMART goals.
Make sure that the social media management framework you are using has goals set according to what your company wants to achieve.
To measure the results of your social media efforts, Google Analytics has a number of reports that can help you to analyse how much impact your work is having. These reports can help you analyse and report back to the board on insights from your activities.
You can gain insights on:
- Network referrals: how much traffic your site receives.
- Data Hub Activity: shows you the posts that took place at one time, which allows you to better understand what trends are driving your content strategy.
- Social referrals landing pages: Tracks the top social media campaigns in order to help you better understand what your audience is consuming.
- Trackbacks: you can find out what information sources are sending your way so that you may work with potential influencers for your brand.
- Conversions: your critical to ROI reporting, in order to know how many goals were completed or assisted by social activity and can analyse by platform.
- Plugins Users Flow: Most websites now have social plugins for Facebook, Twitter and other platforms. This report helps you understand how your content is connecting with visitors e.g. blogs may get more shares on LinkedIn than Facebook.
Social media management is an exciting, fascinating and fast moving area. Social media allows for a social structure that is more fair to everyone that can be beneficial to your business as it lets you connect on a one to one level with your customers.
The TALKING social media management framework will help your social media efforts reach their objectives and get the best out of social networks while avoiding common pitfalls. Make sure you’re getting the right people on board, determining the resources necessary to do so and setting goals with benchmarks in order to measure success.
If you want help creating a successful strategy, get in touch with us today.