7 Ways to Make Social Media a Top Marketing Priority

Whether you’re marketing to businesses or consumers, social media marketing should play a prominent role in your marketing plan. In fact, more and more businesses are recognizing that social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube should be a top marketing priority.

The reason is simple: Social media is where your customers and competitors are talking about your market and probably your business. You need to be an active participant in these conversations to influence the dialogue, represent your brand and products, engage customers and prospects, and keep competitors from gaining an advantage.

Here are seven ways to make social media marketing a top priority in your company’s smart marketing strategy:

1. Make social media the official job responsibility of one or more staff members. Give them the task of monitoring social media, creating posts, curating and sharing content developed by others, and generating activity and conversations. They need to do this every day at multiple points during the day, not just a few times a week.
2. Create a social media team in the marketing department that meets regularly to develop ideas, source content, review results, plan initiatives, and assess competitors’ activity.
3. Create a blog for your company’s website. Blogging is the best way to make content creation a systematic process and consistently generate information to share on social media.
4. Develop in-house training to help everyone in your business understand how social media works, how to use (and not use) social media, why social media is important to your organization, and how to contribute content and ideas.
5. Ask for help from subject matter experts in your company to develop rough content for your blog that the marketing staff can edit.
6. Be on the lookout for customer successes you can share on social media. Ask your customer service team to alert you to potential stories.
7. Train your sales representatives to educate clients and prospects about your social media accounts and give them easy tools to connect with you on social media, such as a branded premium or a card-sized handout that lists your social media addresses.

Social Media: Now Part of Every Smart Marketing Strategy

Smart marketers know they need to be where their customers are – and for most organizations today, that place is social media.

Here are more tips from my experience as a marketing strategist and consultant for getting started with social media, getting your company excited about social media, becoming a great content curator, and getting better results from blogging.