Where’s your social road map?

It seems that every week a new social media site or tool is released. While some of these tools are useful, many of them are reincarnations (with different formats) of existing tools that perform largely the same function. Nevertheless, they usually attract users and enough media attention that they are often ”“ and surprisingly ”“ bought for wildly inflated prices by companies seeking to assemble a digital marketing product suite. IBM and Salesforce.com are two recent examples of companies following this purchase-and-assemble strategy.

This leads to the obvious question: How important is a social media suite? It can offer many services and insights that can improve your marketing effectiveness and grow your company. It can also be expensive and often time consuming.

Many suites include the following capabilities:

Ӣ Scheduling and management of posts and campaigns;

Ӣ Analytics;

Ӣ Competitor tracking;

Ӣ Content curation, sharing and promotion;

Ӣ Relationship nurturing; and

Ӣ Brand watch and conversation monitoring.

What these social suites overlook are the many small businesses that need social media marketing, but have neither the time nor money to effectively utilize them. While some of these businesses can ”“ and do ”“ hire a marketing company (like mine) that might utilize these tools on their behalf and achieve a high ROI that usually exceeds 200 percent, for many companies this might still be construed as overkill for several reasons. Instead, what they need to do is to construct a road map.

A road map is an essential part of any social media campaign. In its most simplistic form, think of it as a big calendar in which you schedule the date and time for your social media posts, comments and the like. While this sounds very similar to Hootsuite or one of many similar products, it is only one part ”“ albeit an important part ”“ of what you need to for a successful campaign.

Your road map should include an editorial channel for the strategic placement of content on the handful of social platforms most frequented by your target market, escalation processes for customer service and complaints, the frequency that you check your analytics, conversation monitoring and additional tracking and management of any marketing or sales campaigns you are currently executing. While this sounds like a lot, once mapped out, it becomes quite straightforward. Best of all, it only requires a handful of easily managed programs.

Underperforming social campaigns in many companies are often due to the lack of a road map and the necessary support it requires. In many cases, social media functions are relegated to a single individual with additional responsibilities and haphazard results. Without the knowledge, time and planning to produce an effective strategy and road map, this unfortunate person is often reduced to merely producing updates and (sometimes) tweets on Facebook and Twitter, at best.

Successful social media campaigns require consistent postings and attentiveness. The creation and implementation of a road map that requires participation from many of the company”™s employees and the management and tracking by that single employee who is tasked with the company”™s social media strategy is far more likely to be successful. This creation and management can also be done by an outside company with the majority of the work still be performed by the company.

As Yogi Berra once said, “If you don”™t know where you”™re going, chances are you will end up somewhere else.” Without a social media road map, you will do a lot of traveling while likely never reaching your destination.

Bruce Newman is the vice president at The Productivity Institute L.L.C. He specializes in content creation and digital marketing. Most of his time is spent in the creation of content for webinars and their promotion, email marketing, education and social media campaigns for clients. He is also the creator of the highly popular The Complete Webinar Training Course. He can be reached at bnewman@prodinst.com.