Created by Voltier Digital for ScottMonty.com

Many marketers fail to see what the big deal is regarding Twitter. They read Tweets about what someone ate for breakfast or what color shirt they’re wearing. They might sign up only to stare at a bare, lonely screen with zero followers.

Initially, it might be difficult to see the potential. But once you get started, Twitter has a tendency to “snowball” into a HUGE deal for marketers – one that is absolutely essential for the growth of their business and their exposure on the internet.

How Can You Use Twitter?

Here are just a few of the ways Twitter can help to benefit your online business:

Establishing repertoire with your customers / readers

Twitter allows for a bit more personal, less formal, more fun mode of communication. It allows them to catch a glimpse of you just as a regular person sending SMS texts from Wal-Mart, rather than as a serious, detached blogger or business owner.

Why is this useful? It allows people to connect and relate to you on a personal level – it makes you look just like a “regular Joe”, especially if you include random/fun tweets among the more serious, business-driven tweets.

Keeping your customers / readers updated

With a blog, you might only update once or twice per week. With Twitter, you might send a handful of tweets per day, keeping your followers “in the loop” and reminding them of your existence.

Of course, it’s not recommended to send a million tweets per day. This will only serve to annoy people and they will likely unfollow you.

Building a loyal, steady customer-base

“BUILD A LIST!” As a marketer, I’m sure you’ve heard this refrain many times over. Building a list is one of the most vital steps you can take in the advancement of your online business. Twitter is pretty much the same as building a list – although it might be even more effective in the long run.

When it comes to an email list, a large portion of your subscribers won’t even glance at the emails you send. Their eyes will glaze over and they may even send it to the trash. With Twitter, your followers will see all of your Tweets. They’ll digest its information in about half a second and if you include a link, they probably won’t get offended.

Chances are, if you included an eye-catching description, they’ll probably click it! Additionally, it won’t SEEM like you are marketing to them, because you’re just another Twitter user tweeting about random stuff!

Building up excitement for a product launch

Just like with an email list, Twitter can be used to build up excitement about an upcoming product launch. It can start with occasional Tweets about your “new project”, and by keeping your followers up to date and offering freebies and cool stuff that they’ll appreciate, you’ll build trust and anticipation. When your product launches, a well-timed Tweet may likely be just as effective as a blast to your email list.

Driving traffic to your website

Wouldn’t it be great if you could instantly notify hundreds or thousands of people every time you update your blog? Twitter makes this possible. It essentially acts as an RSS feed. By building a sizable list of followers, you pretty much have access to an instant source of traffic to your website or blog.

People who would otherwise not be aware of updates and new content will be notified, giving them a chance to check it out. If your blog is high-quality, people will keep an eye out for more of your Tweets.

Building relationships with business contacts.

Twitter makes it easy to keep in touch with business partners and contacts. Traditional instant messaging is on its way out, and you’ll find that most savvy internet marketers use Twitter as their primary social networking tool. So take advantage of this fact! Hook up with your contacts so you can work on building a closer relationship.

Crowd-sourcing

Crowd-sourcing is a unique form of outsourcing. It works by calling on your friends, fans, followers, email subscribers, etc. to contribute ideas and solutions. Basically, it is a form of “group intelligence”.

By listening to the crowd, marketers and business owners can figure out the exact thoughts, needs, and wants of their customer base. In this way, innovative new ideas and strategies are born that are guaranteed to fall in line with the desires of the consumer.

By directly asking your followers what type of new software they’d like to see developed, or what their biggest setbacks are, or what they liked/disliked most about your last ebook, you can gain an incredibly amount of insight about your business!

Twitter provides a perfect platform for crowd-sourcing.

Crowd-sourcing is a unique form of outsourcing. It works by calling on your friends, fans, followers, email subscribers, etc. to contribute ideas and solutions. Basically, it is a form of “group intelligence”.

By listening to the crowd, marketers and business owners can figure out the exact thoughts, needs, and wants of their customer base. In this way, innovative new ideas and strategies are born that are guaranteed to fall in line with the desires of the consumer.

Going viral

Social networking sites give us a great opportunity to ‘go viral’. This means that you Tweet about something that really catches people’s attention. Your followers are impressed, so they re-Tweet it.

In turn, each of their followers re-Tweet it, and so on and so on, and soon your little Tweet spreads like wildfire, snowballing into a huge storm of clicks and traffic.

Of course, TRYING to make something go viral probably won’t work. It tends to just happen on its own. Tweeting “Hey guys buy my new ebook click here” will never go viral, obviously. But if you find something really interesting, little-known, valuable, funny, etc., you might have a chance.

Very often, Tweets go viral without anyone really expecting or planning on it. This is just one of the many amazing benefits of social networking.

Twitter won’t do you much good if no one bothers to click your links. Writing eye-catching, interesting tweets involves the same general concept as writing strong e-mail headlines. You must pique their interest and make them curious to see what you have to offer.

• Ask a provocative question. “Will’s Obama’s new tax reforms bring your small business to its knees?”

• Write a headline that sounds like news. “New Twitter software revolutionizes social networking!”

• Lists. “Ten Reasons Why You Need To Trash Your Iphone”

• How-to tweets. “How to get 1000 visitors to your blog – overnight!”

As you can see, it’s not really rocket science. Just be creative. Instead of tweeting, “New SEO Ebook released today! Get it now!”, think of all the different ways you could say roughly the same thing in a more interesting fashion.

• “Revolutionary New SEO System Kicks Google’s Ass!”

• “How much would you pay to kick Google’s ass?”

• “What if I told you that everything you know about Google – IS WRONG?”

• “Tired of crap? Get the system that ACTUALLY WORKS.”

• “10 Reasons Why Your Website Isn’t Ranking – And How To Fix It”

You get the idea.

If you’re using bit.ly to shorten your URLs, you can actually track your links. This way, you can find out which headline is bringing in the most clicks, and replicate it again and again.

Of course, as I mentioned before, these “eye-catching” headline tweets should only be tossed in here and there. Keep the majority of your tweets free of advertising altogether, or people will quickly become fed up with your blatant, desperate marketing attempts.

Your social media marketing plan must do more than just say what you want to happen. It must describe each step required to make sure that it happens.

Define Key Tasks and who will be involved

The plan should therefore include a schedule of key tasks. This sets out what will be done, by whom, and by when. Refer to the schedule as often as possible to avoid losing sight of your objectives under the daily workload.

Resources

It should also assess what resources you need. Decide if you need to assign tasks to third parties and how to source them. You might also need to look at how much time it takes to prepare the designs and extra materials that will be needed.

Budget

The cost of everything in the plan needs to be included in a budget. If your finances are limited, your plan will need to take that into account. Don’t spread your marketing activities too thinly – it is better to concentrate your resources to make the most of your budget.

Management

As well as setting out the schedule, the plan needs to say how it will be controlled. You need an individual who takes responsibility for pushing things along. A good schedule and budget should make it easy to monitor progress. When things fall behind schedule, or costs overrun, you need to be ready to do something about it and to adapt your plan accordingly.

The plan must be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Aligned, Realistic/Relevant, and Time-bound). This means you must decide exactly what you expect to create, and how you will recognize it when you are done.

Define the marketing methods and tactics

Marketing online requires different methods and tactics.  These tactics should be used in line with the “terms and conditions” of the social media sites. You might want to organize social events, provide giveaways and use online video to promote your business.  At this stage you will need to specify these methods and fully understand how to implement them or have someone to implement them for you.

Plan how to Monitor Social Media activities

Although, the monitoring phase is a different phase entirely, the planning of what needs to be done during monitoring. A least, provide the framework for the monitoring, the cost, and who should be responsible to lead the monitoring phase.

Plan how to Measure & Report.

A clear plan to measure and report needs to be defined. The important reason why you should plan this here is to be able to have a budget estimate of what the entire operation is going to cost the company.

Why I designed The Social Media Marketing Plan Methodology

I wrote this methodology due to the unhealthy proliferation of the “Shinning Object” Internet Marketing schemes. I want to steer the discussion away from “get-rich quick” schemes peddled by most internet marketers and provide step by steps methods to help people understand how to use social media for marketing their products and brands.

Social media marketing is not about software or the next hyped tactics on facebook. It is about social conversation. I want this work to provide a systematic approach to social media marketing.  This methodology when followed closely will provide huge return of investment to your marketing campaign on social media.

As a consultant, I was often called upon by my clients to provide clear and concise methods to reach business goals. The advantage of using a method is that it is process based, and repeatable. This makes the process easy to learn and easily assigned to others.

 This is a serious document and a work in progress to be used by individuals, and corporations to design a repeatable, and strategic based social media marketing program.

A Social Media Marketing Plan

Social Media Marketing can be complex. There are many social media environment you can invest your time and money. However, resources are limited, so one needs to choose the battle that is winnable in a very short time.

A good plan is 50% of the battle won. Spending lots of resource in the planning phase is of paramount importance. This is where you should have a plan that is easy to implement. You need to put a process in place to ensure the plan can be carried out by people who are assigned to implement it.

Goals of the Social Media Marketing Plan

The plan should contain the following elements to improve your social media presents:

Increase Your Social Likeability

If people do not like your brand or your company they tend to stay away from it. You want to have people who are happily engaged in conversation about your company. This can be done by Social likeability.

The more fans you have, the more people you have to spread your message.  This is because all messages posted on social media have a way of reaching your fans.  Secondly, you can direct ads specifically to reach fans of your company. This in turn will help distribute your message.

Increase Web Interaction

Most visitors already know your business website. The disadvantage of websites compare to social media environment is that websites are mostly static. Social media is interactive and dynamic. To keep the attention of your web visitors and let them engage in your Social conversation you need to introduce this targeted traffic to your social media presence.

It is important to have a plan to interaction with the potential clients (fans) and also have a plan to allow the clients to have interaction with each other. That is what social media is all about. Using the right plan will ensure that people will get others involve in talking about your business.

Keep Your Audience Motivated
One of the most powerful ways to keep your fans motivated and to keep coming to your social gathering is to provide incentives. Getting good result in social media marketing by using giveaway can only give the right result if done properly. If you are going to use incentives it must be perfectly planned out.

Create Effective Social Media Content

People are getting overwhelmed with too much information. People have so much information that they do not know what do to with it. The goal here is not to produce more information but to present your audience with educating, and engaging content that will help them to either buy or promote your product freely.

You need to plan contents that would educate, entertain and empower your audience to keep them engaged and coming back for more. People are different in how they learn, entertain and absorb information therefore, adjust your content to meet the different types of learning pattern of your audience.

Motivate and Intervene in Brand Conversation

Social media is a double edged sword. It can be used by others to destroy your brand or your product. Before social media, if a customer is not happy with your service they can go home and tell their friends and family about it. Today, if your customer is not happy they get to tell the whole world about it. As a result, it is important that your company have a system in place to monitor the conversation taken place about your company on social media and intervene in these conversations either to quell a bad rumor or fix any grievance they may have.

Cultivate and Engage With Audience

Social media is dynamic and mostly multi-user interactions. To be successful your company must find a way to initiate and stimulate multi user interactions. These interactions are essential to help invite others into the conversation.

Consistently call for action

People who visit your sites or social media pages may not always know what to do. Your task is to give them an easy access to your services and products. The best way to do this is to have a plan to consistently call for action. This sound simple and yet not many companies are doing it. For the fact that your site may be successful already does not mean this is the best you can get out of the site.

Help Visitors Share Your Message

The visitors to your website need to have a clear way to share your messages with others on social media. Statistics have shown that facebook users often have at least 130 friends. These friends are potential people to share your business information with. However, you need to provide these visitors and easy way to do this.

Combine Social Media with Mobile media

There are more mobile devices out there today than there are computers. The trend is now going towards the use social media on these mobile devices, such as iPhone. iPad and Andriod. According to Google, there are more people now than ever using mobile devices to search for information. The best approach is to combine these two media to reach your target audience in the optimal way.

Are people able to access your site using their mobile devices? If not, you could be losing business.  Plan this into your social media program.

Tooling

Knowing the steps involved in this methodology will help you find the right tools for the job. The right tools are essential to your social media marketing. You need to get access to battle tested tools which are produced by reputable companies. For example, how are you going to monitor and measure your activities and report on them?  Using the right tools will ensure you can make this methodology to work for you.

The implementation guide has list of tools for the job

What should be included in the marketing plan?

Your marketing plan must do more than just say what you want to happen. It must describe each step required to make sure that it happens.

Define Key Tasks and who will be involved

The plan should therefore include a schedule of key tasks. This sets out what will be done, by whom, and by when. Refer to the schedule as often as possible to avoid losing sight of your objectives under the daily workload.

The Project Plan

Resources

It should also assess what resources you need. Decide if you need to assign tasks to third parties and how to source them. You might also need to look at how much time it takes to prepare the designs and extra materials that will be needed.

Budget

The cost of everything in the plan needs to be included in a budget. If your finances are limited, your plan will need to take that into account. Don’t spread your marketing activities too thinly – it is better to concentrate your resources to make the most of your budget.

Management

As well as setting out the schedule, the plan needs to say how it will be controlled. You need an individual who takes responsibility for pushing things along. A good schedule and budget should make it easy to monitor progress. When things fall behind schedule, or costs overrun, you need to be ready to do something about it and to adapt your plan accordingly.

The plan must be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Aligned, Realistic/Relevant, and Time-bound). This means you must decide exactly what you expect to create, and how you will recognize it when you are done.

Define the marketing methods and tactics

Marketing online requires different methods and tactics.  These tactics should be used in line with the “terms and conditions” of the social media sites. You might want to organize social events, provide giveaways and use online video to promote your business.  At this stage you will need to specify these methods and fully understand how to implement them or have someone to implement them for you.

A vision is what hooks everything together in any endeavor.  To be successful in social media marketing you need to have a company vision solely for your social media marketing. Such vision should form the foundation in which a strategy on social media marketing is based. When done right, this could be the catalyst to transform your business into the leader in your industry.

A good vision is not an optional component.  This must be accompanied by a good mission statement which is simple enough for everyone to understand and must be set by the management.  A vision must be something that is supported by the leaders of the company.

The purpose of a vision is to create a mental picture charged with emotion that can serve to energize and inspire you and your team. A good social media marketing vision statement should include the following:

• State a clear social media standard of excellence
• Clarifies the direction and purpose of your social media marketing
• Inspires enthusiasm and commitment for social media
• Bridge the gap between social media and traditional marketing
• Make sure it is clear and easy to understand
• Be ambitious, and declares the best possible outcome. This should get everyone out of the comfort zone.

When you have created your vision you need to write it down as a mission statement which everyone involved in the marketing project can read.

Strategy is the thinking aspect of planning a change, organizing or planning something. Strategy lays out the goals that need to be accomplished and the ideas for achieving these goals.

The objective here is to create a clear strategy in line with the vision statement created earlier. This is a high level view of what needs to be done to achieve business objectives.

These objectives are part of the general business goals. The question that needs to be answered here is what do you want to accomplish with social media and how?

There are many social media platforms today, such as facebook, Twitter and Youtube and Myspace. The share number of social media sites makes it very important to have a strategy, and not a shot-gun approach in marketing using social media. A good strategy is the only way to avoid wasting time and resources in social media marketing.

Define your goals

Goals are necessary for measurement. You must define what the end result would look like for your company. This will help move the project forward. Expectations will help you stay realistic and focus.

1. Do you want to use social media to drive traffic to your site or solely focus on interaction?
2. Will your goal be best served with using social community or create your own social media environment.

Some of the core goals that could be parts of your strategy are:

1. Build brand awareness
2. Generate more leads
3. Generate more sales
4. Strengthen relationships with clients, prospects, and influencers
5. Build a better understanding of your buyers
6. Increase web site traffic
7. Improve customer service
8. Identify new product ideas
9. Improve search engine rankings
10. Drive targeted traffic to your web property or events

Traditional marketing methods do not necessary work on social media. Social media was created to share unbiased information about anything online. It is dangerous to inject old fashion marketing ideas into social media and hope to make it work.

How do you locate your audience, and what conversation are they carrying out? How do you become part of the conversation?  Other things to be included in the strategy are:

1. How do you inject yourself into the conversation in a positive way?
2. What voice will you use in the conversation with your audience?
3. What added value can you provide to your audience in terms of knowledge, opinion or content?
4. How do you interact with them to earn their trust?
5. After you have earned their trust, how can you ask for their attention for your product or service?
6. How do you create your sales funnel to point people from the conversation toward considering your product?

Social Media Marketing can be complex. There are many social media environment you can invest your time and money. However, resources are limited, so one needs to choose the battle that is winnable in a very short time.

A good plan is 50% of the battle won. Spending lots of resource in the planning phase is of paramount importance. This is where you should have a plan that is easy to implement. You need to put a process in place to ensure the plan can be carried out by people who are assigned to implement it.

The plan must be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Aligned, Realistic/Relevant, and Time-bound). This means you must decide exactly what you expect to create, and how you will recognize it when you are done.

You should keep your SMM plan simple. Social media is simple and not complex. There is no need to make your plan overly complicated.  The most important part is to develop a step by step plan based on proven strategy to achieve the determined goals.