Social Media Marketing Guidelines for 2013

Getting the latest news updates via Twitter. Planning an event via Facebook. Brainstorming over Google+. Learning how to lose weight over YouTube. Keeping vigil on the latest fashion trends via Instagram.

Clearly, social networking sites have gone beyond their virtual borders, but have actually permeated everyday human living and have changed and revolutionized how people conduct their day to day lives. With this level of intrusiveness, social media marketing has become for every business or organization to reach their audiences far and wide.

In 2012, social media has occupied a larger place in the online marketing mix and many innovative strategies and tactics were developed. This year, for you to be successful in social media marketing, you have to follow the guidelines stated below.

Get the Buy-in of Relevant Internal Stakeholders
Social media is a lot easier to handle in the scale of small business marketing. However, for enterprises and really large companies wherein there are numerous departments that have a stake in social media marketing, it is imperative that you get them on board before starting anything. Your social media marketing initiatives are only as strong as the person with the weakest belief in what it can bring to your company. So, you need to make everyone appreciate social media by making a solid case on how it can benefit their individual departments and the company as a whole.

There should be a social media liaison in the organization to act as the middle man and do all the necessary coordination across these different executives. At the end of the day, your main goal is to have everyone moving in a single social media direction.

Make an Inventory of All Your Assets Which You Can Repurpose for Social Media
A lot of newbies social media marketers have this misconception that they have to start from scratch. Save yourself significant amount of time by conducting an extensive and thorough inventory of all marketing and sales materials which you can repurpose for a social media setting. If you are considering to hire social media marketing agency, you need to have this list of assets before you even go to that first meeting.

An Honest Assessment of Your Social Efforts in 2012
Or the lack thereof. If you did not have any social media campaigns in 2012, let it serves as a wake-up call for 2013. The world is going social and it’s a business suicide not to engage in social media marketing.

For those who did roll out social media campaigns in the past year, gauge your performance. What worked and what did not? What were the types of content that you used? What were the top messages that you tried to communicate to your audience and how did you do it? What was the level of engagement? Make sure that you are maximizing social media monitoring tools so you can mine rich data.

Correlating SEO and Social Media
There’s really no denying the connection between social media marketing and search engine optimization. Integration is the key in many facets of online marketing and the same is the case with SMM and SEO.

Ensure that you know which keywords are driving traffic and conversions and make sure that you are integrating the same with your social media marketing strategies. Further, track down mentions of these keywords across various social networks and see how it boosts SEO.

Identify Your 2013 SMM Goals
And make sure you veer away from the traditional metrics which are primarily focused on numbers (i.e. number of fans, number of followers, etc.). Look into viral factoring, engagement levels, quality of conversations and conversions. Make sure these metrics factor into your overall business direction.

By identifying these objectives, it will also help you determine whether you can do SMM in-house or if you need to hire social media marketing agency.