By M. Isi Eromosele

Social media is one of the most effective communications tools we’ve had at our disposal for a long time. It has engendered a huge shift in how we engage with people. And it can deliver great results. However, it’s not necessarily right for every business.

There are a number of considerations to think about before you climb aboard. The following are questions that will need to be answered to help you to understand more about what’s involved and whether it’s right for you.

Is social media appropriate for your line of business?

Are your customers, clients and the people you want to connect with using social media? Are your competitors active in this space? Have you searched to see if people are already having conversations about your business, your industry niche or even your brand? If the answer is yes, then it could be a very useful tool for you.

There are some great free tools you can use to find what conversations are happening now. Social Mention is a tool that searches for brand names or keywords mentioned across the web. Twitter Search is a nifty little tool that offers a variety of ways to search for brand names or keywords on Twitter.

Google Blog Search does as the name suggests, let’s you search across the blogosphere. And of course, there is Google Alerts, which allows you to set up alerts that are emailed to you when a keyword is mentioned. These are just a few examples, there are many more.

Do you have buy in from your staff?

So you’ve determined that social media can help your business. Do your staff and other stakeholders feel the same? If not, you could be heading for an uphill battle. Social media can take a lot of time and resources, resources that can quickly be rendered useless if the staff doesn’t see the true value.

Make life easier for yourself by building a business case that will get full, ongoing

support from the start.

Do you have the resources for it?

Do you have someone that can dedicate ongoing time to social media? Are you able to restructure a member of your staff’s job description to allow for it? Can you commit to this time and not take this person away from their social media activities when it gets busy?

Remember, you can’t open the door to social media and close it when workload increases. If the answer is yes to these, then you do. If not, you may want to rethink about who you can use for this, either externally or internally.

Do you have the time for it?

Social media really is a marathon not a sprint, so don’t expect results overnight. Are you prepared to invest the time with little output at the beginning? Are you prepared to put in the groundwork even when you won’t see the return on your investment right away? Do you have the patience for it? If so, you’ll reap the rewards in the long run.

Is it a priority for you?

Do you have a quality, fully optimized website you can direct people to from your social media profiles or blog? Or is your website full of business content that doesn’t engage your audience?

Do you have other marketing or PR priorities to deal with first? Make sure your house is in order; it will be easier to integrate social media with your other activities if you do.

Do you know what your objectives are?

Do you know and understand what you want to achieve with social media? Are you clear what it can do for you and what it can’t? Have you tied this into your business plan?

You need to be certain of your goals before you start, otherwise you’ll waste a lot of time and effort on something that isn’t targeted to your specific needs.

Social media is more than just a ‘campaign’, it’s a long term commitment that needs ongoing support and to get a long-term commitment, you need a strong business case.

Aligning the business case with your business

First things first, get hold of the business plan and marketing strategy. Have a look at the objectives and work out which can be achieved by using social media. Be realistic here, social media isn’t the answer to everything, so pick out those that are achievable.

Then do your homework. Find examples of other businesses (preferably within your sector) that have achieved those objectives. Show how achievable it is, show how it can be measured, show an idea of realistic timescales.

Who’s using it?

Think about your stakeholders. These can be customers, clients, suppliers, partners, employees, journalists, peers, investors and anyone else your business needs to connect with. Segment these and then find where they are online. What social media platforms are they using? Is there a large number using Facebook? Twitter? LinkedIn? A niche social networking site? Can you find any stats showing usage?

You need to prove that the people you need to connect with are using social media. If you can find case studies that show results of how others have engaged with these audiences, use them.

Competitive analysis

Find out which platforms your competitors are using. Do they have any success stories or case studies? Do they appear to be reaping other rewards through using social media (has their press coverage increased? Has brand awareness grown? Are they directly engaging with prospects online? Are they speaking regularly at events?).

If so, these are great ways of showing how social media can work. But, don’t be put off if you can’t find many using social media. It could be that take-up in your industry is slow, which means you could be the first.

Brand reputation management

Finally, and perhaps the piéce de résistance to those brands that are regularly talked about, find what’s being said about you online. Show what people truly think of your brand using the free tools such as Social Mention and Twitter Search. This really can make people sit up, take notice and realize they need to be part of that conversation.

How will you do it?

The next step is to identify your goals and objectives. Goals are general, wider intentions whereas objectives are precise, measurable steps that help you to achieve your goals.

Identifying your objectives for social media is essential. If you have no specific reasons for using it, you’ll spend a lot of time having very enjoyable conversations, but these will achieve nothing. You’ll have no results to show how it’s working for you and no justification for the time and budget spent on it.

So start with your business plan and marketing strategy. What overall business goals do you need to meet? Break these down and think about whether social media can help you meet them.

Be realistic and identify those goals you can achieve. If you have a marketing strategy (and if not, why not?) go through those goals and objectives and pull out those that social media can help you to achieve. The key here is to align your social media objectives with your business goals to ensure you can achieve what you need to.

There is a wide range of objectives social media can help you with and an example of these is listed below.

Obviously, this list may not be right for your business and you won’t know which objectives are right until you’ve analyzed your business plan and/or marketing strategy, but it gives you a good idea of the types of things you can achieve by using social media.

Now I wouldn’t suggest including all of these. You’ll be setting yourself up for a fall if you do as there are far too many to manage. Instead pick out the key objectives you can achieve and don’t forget to apply the SMART rule: all objectives should be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Timely. 

You’ll need to apply realistic time frames to each one and identify the metrics that will allow you to measure whether you’re achieving what you set out to achieve.

M. Isi Eromosele is the President | Chief Executive Officer | Executive Creative Director of Oseme Group - Oseme Creative | Oseme Consulting | Oseme Finance

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