Forming a Social Media Success Plan – Step 4

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There are 7 steps to building a successful social media platform. During the next few weeks, we will be going over these steps one at a time.

The steps are:

  1. Create a Vision
  2. Set Strategic Goals
  3. Find Your Social Media Voice (Persona)
  4. Build Your Social Media Platform
  5. Create a Publishing Plan
  6. Build Your Tribe (Community)
  7. Evaluate Your Results

This week we’ll talk about building your platform. Facebook will be used as an example, but most points apply to all platforms.

If you’ve been following this series, you should have determined your social media vision statement (see step 1), set your strategic goals (in step 2), and determined your social media voice (in step 3). If you don’t already have one, you’ll need a Facebook page for your business. This is not a difficult thing to set up (it typically takes me between an hour and a half and two hours to set up a page for a client). For some do-it-yourself step-by-step directions, see these instructions from Social Media Examiner.

On Facebook, you want separate pages for personal and business.

PERSONAL

  • family photos
  • personal status updates (i.e. “Christmas Eve service was wonderful”)
  • occasional shared status from my business page

BUSINESS

  • links to my blog post
  • photo quotes
  • shared business articles

Many of my friends don’t care to see articles from Entrepreneur, and some of my business associates might not care to see my Runkeeper updates.

Assuming you already have a Facebook business page, answer the following questions:

  • Is your profile complete and well put together?
  • Do the design elements shine a positive light on your brand? Is it consistent with your website?
  • Do you have a content publishing plan in place? (We’ll look at this more in the next post).
  • Are you engaging your audience consistently?
  • What tools are you using to power your platform (e.g., Hootsuite, Buffer)?

Your three action items for this week:

  1. Make sure your timeline photo is consistent with your vision and persona.
  2. Make sure your profile photo shines a light on your brand.
  3. Create a compelling “about” description – in 180 characters or less.

Next time we will talk about creating a publishing plan.

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