Some people have strange ideas about social media. We decided to sum up our experience in social media guidelines which is basically just a quick/short guide explaining how social media management works.

Step 1 – understand your audience

Yes, yes. You wanted to immediately start doing something with fancy tools, and you’re being brought back to basics? True, but this is absolutely necessary to manage your social media properly. How can you even post something, if you don’t understand for whom you’re posting?

So, the very first step is to understand who your potential customers are. There are many ‘names’ for that – some call it buying persona, some call it customer profile, some call it empathy map. It is more or less about the same. We prepared for you a simple format that you might follow for creating empathy map, and this is really the first step to achieve success in social media.

There are several sources you can use to fill your empath map – first of all, of course, ask your customers (or potential customers if you’re new to the market).  Ask your sales team who work with clients every day. Read forums and social communities where your potential customers talk and ask for solutions. If you have some research budget – conduct a survey.

Step 2 – create semantic kernel

We earlier posted good article on that to help you. When you have these two – empathy map and semantic kernel you will be armed to move to another step which is –

Step 3 – create/update a site

You may already have one or not. But you need it anyway. We honestly have no idea how can you do something on the social media without having a site where all your customers go to make an order or purchase something.

There is one most important requirement which you need to check even if you already have a site:

Make sure your site looks good on mobile devices. A lot of social engagement happens on the mobile devices. So when your potential customers reads an interesting post and goes to your site, it should look fine on his device.

It is very often overlooked requirements, but it is essential.

You may hear that creating website costs a lot of money. It obviously depends on the complexity, but generally you shouldn’t expect some typical small business site cost more than $1000 to create, and often even much less!

Step 4 – fill the site with content

The whole point of preparing empathy map and semantic kernel (steps 1 and 2) was to get you a solid understanding of what your potential customers want (or are being scared by) and a set of keywords they might use to find a solution. So go ahead and start writing articles on that.

You don’t have to wait till you create whole lot of articles before actually moving into social media. Just prepare about 10 of them first, it will be enough to start with something, and you’ll follow up later with new ones. Creating articles for your site is practically infinite process – it is hard to imagine that you simply can’t imagine any new idea what to post about.

First of all, you put your articles onto your site, like in a blog section. And then –

Step 5 – start publishing content on social networks

Ok, that is all the preparations were for :). So, when you’ve got some good set of useful articles for your audience, start publishing them to your social pages.

We know there is a tendency to post very often, as a part for fighting for audience’s eyeballs. Like if you post more, they will have better chance to see ‘something’. While that is true to some extend, your time and money is limited. We recommend rather focus on posting quality stuff than a lot of useless things begging for attention, the possible minimum is about 2 good articles in a week, but in many cases it will be enough to attract new followers (provided you promote those posts).

Step 6 – get initial subscribers

It really seems a bit wicked when there is a new page advertised and it has only 2 subscribers. So, when you just start – ask all your coworkers/colleagues/relatives to like your page or follow you, so at least you’ve got some 20-50 people already. It will help other (unknown to you) people like/follow easier, than it would be when there is almost no one liking your page.

Step 7 – promote your communities on social networks

There are 3 major way to get new subscribers:

• Advertising – all major social networks have their own official way to advertise either your posts or your community. Use them, try them, try several approaches, see what works and not.
  • There is a sub-point here about remarketing to your site visitors or clients – basically it means showing your ads to those who either visited your site or became client.
• Influencers’ posts – you basically pay someone with huge followers base to post about your product or communities.
• Run some contest – you ask people to do something – like posting a picture in the album and subscribe to your community and you choose somehow the winner. Either randomly or by number of likes or somehow else. But remember about social network terms and what they allow in contests and what they do not.

The most practical approach is to try all 3 methods, find out which one brings more subscribers who engage and for less money, and just step on it when you find the best way.

Step 8 – make offers (from time to time)

That part is often avoided, wrongly, as some marketers believe that they provide interesting content and it is great and making a direct offer to buy something considered as ‘rude’ for their audience. We totally disagree with that. The whole point initially was to get sales from social media.

To sell something you need to be selling.

How can you sell something to people who don’t even know the offer is there? We now have very short attentions span on socials, so only most engaged customers will eagerly go and check out your website. Just post your offer, really.

However, you shouldn’t do it too often. Your non-selling or not-directly-selling content should dominate. Think of it as of TV channels and ads in them. You watch TV and expect there to be some ads. If there are two many ads, you’ll soon stop watching this TV channel, unless it is very-very-really interesting. And now there is so much of a competition around.

Step 9 – stimulate engagement

Ok, you can ask for it by adding ‘share this for your friends’, but now some socials started to hunt for posts which beg for the engagement and decrease their visibility, so don’t overdo it.

One of the cool little trick we recommend is this – you may either find some of your friends who are not directly connected to your business or buy some comments (there are services to do that). Ask your friends to ask questions in your social communities (or buy comments with questions) – and answer them as a brand. Something like – ‘do you deliver to city X’ – ‘yes, we do’. ‘Can I have it in XXL size?’ – ‘yes, you can order XXL size’. Etc.

The whole point of doing it is to provide an image of active community where comments are welcome and answered quickly. It will help real people who have questions about your product to voice them, so you can answer and probably turn them into customers.

I really like the analogy of a bar. Imagine yourself being in a dull bar where everyone is sitting, and now your favorite song plays. Would you jump up and start dancing? Hardly so, or you have to be really self-assured person. Now imagine you’re in a bar where lots of people dancing – would you go then if you feel like it? Certainly!

That’s the same with comments. When nobody asks anything, it seems like total silence in the community. It is very uncomfortable to ask here anything. So you need to break that image and show that questions are welcome, and they’re answered quickly.

However, tracking comments can be tricky, but it is very important task. If people ask about your product – they’re very close to buying.  It may be ok, if you have just one Facebook page and you’re totally online on Facebok, you probably wouldn’t have any problem. But if you have Facebook Page, Instagram account, Twitter account and YouTube channel – you may be just lose track of what is going where, as not all the social networks send you very clear notification that the question has been asked.

For this we created our service – Chotam.io – think of it as a single place hub for all you social comments. When someone comments, you’ll receive email alert or Telegram alert. You can also connect your other team members who may answer if you’re busy at the moment.

That’s it for social media guidelines!

When you do what is written above, you’ll have a strong active community, which subscribers base volume will depend only on how good your content are and whether you found an effective way to advertize.

Just to sum things up – the whole thing is going around this –

• Understand the audience
• Create great content for them – very specifically – to address things they have in mind, they search for, they need answers on
• Publish content on your social communities
• Promote your community
• Publish your offers from time to time
• Stimulate questions in the community (to further convert into buyers)

That’s really it. If doing so and collecting something like 5000 subscribers you still can’t sell to them, then something is totally wrong: either the product is wrong, the price is wrong, you attract wrong people or something else. However, if you spend enough time understanding your audience (step 1) it is very unlikely that your further actions will be so misguided.