Raise your hand if you've been told that you must have a social media strategy. Good. And it's true, you need a strategy. The mistake is thinking that developing a strategy comes first.
Your strategy supports your goals.
Your goal might simply be to boost your Google page rank. Or your goal might be to energize your most loyal enthusiastic customer and turn them into evangelists for your company. These two goals require entirely different strategies.
Now I hear you saying, "OK, let's set some goals first." we're making progress here, but we're not ready to set goals yet either.
Know Your Audience
The real place to start is to ask yourself two questions:
1. Who are my customers?
2. What problem do I solve for them?
Who Are Your Customers?
Who are they, really? Not just at a superficial demographic level, understand them at a deeper level. What is her job like? If your customer is someone in a corporation, what goals is she being measured against during her annual review? Is your product or service and integral part of meeting one of those goals? Or is the problem you solve simply one of those things getting in the way of meeting her goals?
What Problem Do You Solve?
Be able to articulate it in your customer's words, not yours. You want the description to resonate with your future customer on an emotional level. When they read the words on your website or tweet or Facebook page you want them to say to themselves, "Oh man this is it!".
When someone is using Google to search for an answer to their problem, Google presents them with millions of websites. I know you spend a lot of time and money getting that person to click on your link. Think about this: She is going to spend just a few seconds scanning your website to see if it is the answer to her problem. Make those seconds count.
If you can't articulate the problem you solve in your customers' words then you are just adding to the noise.
Here are the magic beans: Learn to ask yourself these two questions and you start to understand the real value you bring to your customers. You begin to see how you are different and better than your competitors.
When you learn to ask yourself these two questions it will change the way you think about your business.
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