Developing a Social Media Strategy

As our culture becomes more niche, it becomes increasingly difficult for advertisers and companies to reach their target audiences. However one needs a strategy to leverage social networks ethically. I've outlined some steps in order to develop a strategy to utilize these networks.

(1) Identify your niche. This may seem obvious, but it does not hurt to think about the search keywords that would be most relevant to identifying one's niche. Sometimes people do not give significant thought to not only the most relevant keywords, but permutations or misspellings of those keywords.

(2) Find blogs and tweets relevant to that niche. Find out what is going on in those niches. It is imperative that one keep abreast of the interesting conversations that occur within members of a niche. In order to do this, one can utilize any number of softwares, like technocrati and twitscoop. Only by reading what people are interested in, can you gain real insight into your niche.

(3) Determine if what you are selling is of value to the niche. Even though you may think that your product is fantastic, it may turn out that for whatever reason your niche is not interested. This may be due to the fact that there may be a better option, or that the issue the product addresses no longer is an issue, or that you are targeting the wrong niche. You can learn whether your product or offer is relevant through the insight gathered in the last step.

(4) Develop your delivery method. Will I market this product through text ads, banners, or some combination? How will the offer look? What will it say? Will a person that clicks on the ad first go to a landing page or straight to the offer? Delivery method is a crucially important step. In fact, a good relevant delivery method is a huge factor in how well the offer does.

(5) Measure, measure, and measure. It is important to track your offers to determine what works best. Often times two offers that sell the same product will have tremendously different results. You must track these offers in order to determine what elements make them effective.

As always please comment on how helpful you think this post is....