The question that my clients have been asking me recently is what should my company be doing on Facebook and Twitter?  My first response is not to rush into anything, don’t be swept into the hype that says you have to be tweeting every 20 minutes or your falling behind. This does not mean that there no value in social networking for business. I believe that social networking outreach needs to make sense within a company’s overall marketing strategy, and does not become a directionless monologue with no one listening.

Setting Business Objectives

The first question that needs to be asked is what are you trying to accomplish? Companies need to have a set of specific goals for any communication. Lets take for example a business-to-business company that already invests in going to a series of trade-shows around the country. This company has been going to this same series of events for a number years and has a decent idea as to how many useful contacts they have seen in the past at these shows. This is a great place to employ a goals oriented social networking strategy.  
Setting Social Networking Goals and Benchmarks
The first thing that would help our hypothetical company would be to set reasonable goals to benchmark against, like a 5-10% increase in qualified booth traffic at these meetings. Notice we are not trying to say an increase in the total number of conversations, but an increase in the quality of the conversations at the show, making the limited time available at the show more productive. Finally we would set up a simple system to track the overall quality of interactions at the show. Now that you have a well defined objective with a specific measurement the task becomes focusing on your specific audience.

Defining your Audience

In this step it is important to search out all of the social networks where your target audience is active and interested in hearing you message. We research specific communities inside social networks where sizable audiences have already expressed interest in similar topics and try to establish credibility in that community. Each social network, be it Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or the many industry specific networks have their own pros and cons so it is important to select the right mix for your goal.

Establish Credibility

It seems counter intuitive due to their size, but social networks require a more intimate and personalized approach than other forms of outreach. Unlike traditional advertising channels, interrupting core messaging with your marketing messages does not lead to the best results in social networking marketing. Blasting out every message to all of social network channels you can think of can lead to a poorer brand image. This also helps us interact with a much more interested audience. Lets go back to our example company; we have found three or four Social Network locations that have a large enough audience to meet our goals and an expressed interest in our product category, now we start establishing the company in that space. The company needs to be consistently active, and accessible within that area. We find that setting clients up with tools that easily track multiple social network interactions allows effective interaction with a minimal time effort compared to other marketing channels.

Conversion of Goals

This is where the use of multiple social networking tools can come into play. Once you have established you credentials in your selected communities it’s time to convert that into your business goals. By tying a micro blogging or RSS feed like Twitter into your social networking strategy it becomes simple to update your target audience to your upcoming event, these systems can also be used to set specified appointments with interested parties at upcoming events.  In our example our company has now established itself in target communities and interested parties should be much more receptive to direct communication on upcoming events. If a Social Networking Strategy is tied into specific business goal it becomes a very cost effective way to both stay in touch with your customers and drive increased participation. This example is just one of the many ways to tie Social Networks to business goals; our clients have had success executing referral, product development, and brand awareness campaigns tailored to their business goals.