The 7 Habits of Effective Social Media Marketing

We’ve all heard of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey. You can find 7 Habits of Happy Kids, 7 Habits of Successful Entrepreneurs, and 7 Habits of Successful Pirates if you do a simple Google search.

In honor of Covey’s simple, yet effective managerial wisdom, we’ve come up with our own time-saving version:

7 Habits of Effective Social Media Marketing

1. Have a plan. Social media needs a strategy and that strategy should be cohesive with your overall marketing plan. When you approach social media, you need to have some basic knowledge about your business, the marketplace, and your target audience. What are your competitors doing? Who is your target market? How do you attract customers? The answers to these basic questions will help you develop your strategy.
2. Mind your brand. How is your business perceived in the marketplace? Your social media strategy needs to seamlessly blend with all of your marketing communications. If it doesn’t, you will be confusing customers, and confused customers don’t turn into buyers. Voice, message, fonts, colors, and images all need to appear to come from the same source.
3. Be positive. The general rule of thumb is to be positive. No one wants to see you complain about customers or argue with them online. You don’t need to reiterate your legal contract under a negative review. Just keep it upbeat. Of course, this exchange between Wendy’s and Burger King is hilarious, but for your business, keep yourself out of the weeds - it’s easier to breathe there.
4. Find your voice. Finding your voice is part of finding and maintaining your brand. Your voice needs to represent your company and it needs to speak to your target audience. Social media has a short shelf life. Consumers aren’t going to follow your Twitter feed or your Facebook page if you bore them to death with content they don’t care about.
5. Listen and interact. Nothing is better to a customer than actually getting a reply from a social media post. Interaction breeds engagement, and engagement breeds social media success.
6. Use experts. If you don’t have someone in-house that has social media expertise, then you may need to hire an outside marketing firm. Telling random employees to post on Facebook and Twitter isn’t going to get you very far. Good marketing companies will be able to bothy boost your search engine optimization while meeting your social media goals.
7. Have goals! Track your progress. A knowledgeable marketing company will show you results. Using tracking software like Google Analytics and True Social Metrics will help you see which avenues are effective and which aren’t. It’s important to keep on top of what works and what doesn’t.

Covey knew how valuable time is to a small business owner. Social media without a plan is ineffective and a huge waste of it. If you follow our 7 habits, social media can be an extremely effective tool in your marketing arsenal and well worth your time.

This blog post is dedicated to my daughters who I "made" listen to The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People during our Spring Break car ride from Washington, DC to Boston. They loved it and it inspired me to write this post.

Conveyance Marketing Group is a marketing and web development company with a passion for delivering strategic, sustainable and affordable marketing and web solutions to start-ups and small businesses. Our service offerings include video, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), inbound marketing, graphic design, logo design, advertising and web design. Our creativity is limitless, let us help accelerate the growth of your company! Contact us today for more information on how we can help you.