Will You Spend a Quarter to Make $50,000?

Here’s the premise. If you commit to paying serious attention to your organization’s social media strategy over the next three months, I’m betting that you will see a noticeable increase in your customer engagement, sales, and revenue during the first quarter of 2015. If you are a small operation with, say, $2 million of annual revenue, a 10% increase over the previous year would equate to $50K of additional revenue.

Oh, you thought I meant that you would only need to spend 25 cents to reap this big cash reward? Well, if it were that easy, everyone would be doing it. There will be some real effort involved, but I can pretty much predict that anyone who takes up this challenge and is diligent over the final three months of 2014, will be happy in the coming year.

So, are you up for it? If you are, here are the things we want you to pay attention to.

First, choose your weapons. That is to say, decide on (at least) three social media platforms you will focus upon during this initiative. If you have been reading this blog for very long, or following Innovaision on other social media, you know that the tools we would recommend would be LinkedIn, Twitter, Blogging, Google+, Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube, and Instagram. It isn’t necessary to have a presence on all of these, but choosing a minimum of three has some specific benefits. First, it gives you some flexibility as to what audience(s) you try to reach (e.g. more B2B on LinkedIn, more general/social targets on Twitter and Facebook). Choosing to use both Twitter and Blogging, for example, lets you dash off short messages frequently on the former, and express longer thoughts or more developed themes on the latter. And, don’t underestimate the value of cross-referencing. As soon as this article is posted, I’ll be sure to link to it from Innovaision’s Twitter feed and my LinkedIn page. Get your social media tools to work together in support of one another!

Next, quantify your investment. Decide on how much time you are willing to devote to this experiment. The actual amount of time necessary to do a thorough job will vary, what we can be relatively sure of is that you will spend less time to get the same results by the end of the quarter as you will at the beginning. It’s all about establishing a pattern and a rhythm, and becoming comfortable with the various tools you can use to help you be more efficient and effective. In any event, you should plan to spend between two and four hours per week, per platform, if you want to create positive outcomes. For most Social Media tools, there is somewhat of an inverse relationship between the amount of the content you post and the number of times your readers expect to hear from you. Thus, a Tweet may only be 12 or 15 words, but your Twitter audience might want to hear from you 4 to 6 times a day. Longer thoughts of a paragraph or two are appropriate for LinkedIn or Facebook, but you may only update your feeds on those platforms once a day or 4 to 6 times a week. A good blog posting could be 1000 words or more, once or twice a week.

Speaking of helper tools, while we are not shy about giving you a sneak preview of some of the best out there, it might be wise – particularly if this is the first time you are making a serious commitment to a quality social media plan – to do things “the hard way” first. By learning to use the platforms in their most raw and basic forms, you will be better able to decide what helper software or shortcuts will best serve you down the road. So, make a plan to NOT use any support tools during the first month or so.

Be sure to plan to create thoughtful and well-written content.  Don’t just dash off a few lines or paragraphs, really think about what you are telling the world. Your social sharing will define your reputation in most peoples’ minds. A poorly written sentence, failure to spell-check, or confusing prose will work against you, not in your favor. Write what you want to say, then re-read it at least twice to make sure that you are getting your message across. Pay attention to attention grabbing headlines (like Will You Spend a Quarter to Make $50,000?, for example) that encourage readers to pause and pay attention. Ask for help if you need it, get friends to read your material before you put it out for the world to see.

The next part of your strategy is to commit to the 80/20 rule. This means that four out of five of all of your social media offerings – be they LinkedIn updates, Tweets, Blog posts, whatever – should be helpful, informational, and/or educational and should NOT be directly sales oriented. As we have discussed before in this space (see A Primer on Inbound Marketing and How to Stand Out on Social Media, for example), there is nothing wrong with tooting your own horn, and one ultimate bottom line is selling something, but you will gain loyal followers who can be converted into customers if you consistently offer them content worth reading. Drop your contact information and your sales pitch in now and then, but don’t overdo it. The 80/20 plan seems to be a really good benchmark for this.

To keep you on the plan, once you have made the commitment, you need to keep track of your efforts. This means both prospectively and retrospectively. Create whatever calendars, schedules or checklists you need to insure that you know what you should be working on, or towards, every day. Consult these documents (they could be simple documents of lists, or spreadsheets) and check off your work when you have completed it. You’ll get the satisfaction of accomplishing your goals, and the benefit of being able to look forward to see what you need to do next.

As an additional sign of commitment share your plan with an associate, a trusted friend or adviser. Let them know what you have decided to do over this next quarter, and give them a progress report every couple of weeks or so. It can be very easy to push this important work into the back of your mind when you are busy with many other tasks and projects. It’s a lot harder to do that if you have asked someone else to help you be accountable.

The last recommendation we will make for this ambitious undertaking is that you create ways to track your effectiveness. This could mean investing in some analytical tools, but for a lot of organizations it would be as simple as asking callers and customers “Did you hear about us online?” Make a note of the ways in which your prospective and actual customers find out about you, to see if one or another of the social media platforms you have chosen is working better than others. Don’t do anything with this information during this first quarter, other than compiling it. At the end of the trial, you can re-evaluate, and possibly replace a low-performing platform with a new choice to see if you can get even more out of your plan going forward!