Years ago we were hearing things from our business units internally such as I need to be on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and we need to create a viral video...and we would ask WHY???!!! Those were the days where we all quickly created our FIRST social media strategy to get things under control. HOPEFULLY, we are past this phase of social media and ready to evaluate where we have been, and where do we go from here. What have we learned in the past 5 years? I will give you my perspective.

We initially launched our social media efforts based on what we called "The 4 Pillars of Social Media". Some of you may have seen me present on them:

  • Social Listening
  • Promotion
  • Thought Leadership
  • Customer Support

We thought we had invented sliced bread. We quickly learned as we tried to build momentum in the enterprise that we weren't connecting with the business units within our own company, and now looking back it makes a lot of sense that we missed something critical, and that was we weren't helping our business units meet their business goals. Duh! If you want buy in within your organization you must help them achieve their goals or eliminate a pain point.

Number one and most important:

Your Strategy Must Align with What the Business is Trying to Accomplish!

This could be selling, generating leads, selling parts, providing service.

Second, your social media strategy must align with your marketing strategy...not the other way around,,,and social media can't stand alone. Social media is one channel to engage your customers, and all channels (offline, web, PPC, etc...) must all work together to move people down the sales funnel.

Your Social Media Strategy is a component of your Overall Marketing Strategy!

With those simple principals you can now see how the "4 Pillars of Social Media" can help you achieve your business goals.

The Social listening Pillar can help you understand:

  • Who is talking about your company?
  • What are they talking about?
  • Where are the conversations happening?
  • What are your competitors doing?
  • Who are your key influencers?
  • What is the conversation sentiment?

Now I could write an entire book on what you do with this information so let me know if you would like to know more about social listening.

The Promotion Pillar can now:

  • Move potential customers down the sales funnel

Again that is a very simple statement, but has a lot of steps of execution. The Promotion Pillar really could be called the Content Marketing Pillar. It is really how do you use social media to make people aware of your products/services, and then get them to consider your product. This is really where social media becomes a piece of your content marketing strategy, and awareness and consideration is where social media adds the most value to the promotion pillar. Typically you would post some engaging content and get them to a call to action on a website and get them to a lead form with other pieces of content. This has to be subtle and not just a sell job. My next blog will be about this pillar...so stay tuned!

The Thought Leadership Pillar can:

  • Help your company establish themselves as a source of information relative to your business, and develop a relationship with potential customers that wasn't possible before.

People are always looking for solutions to their problems, and those companies that are providing solutions and not selling all the time are going to win, and they also bring people into the top of the funnel in a new way without selling. Think about this...you do this all the time as a consumer.

And finally Customer Support can:

  • Help you be there for your customers when they need you. These days that has become social media.

Anytime you create a new channel the public will expect you to answer their questions and issues. You must be prepared. We have always had a Customer Interaction Center to help with questions and inquiries that came through our websites and the phone. So what was the logical thing to do? Integrate social media. So the same team that had always handled customer interactions started to take social media questions. It worked out great.

Now I have over simplified a social media strategy and everything that goes into your a "New Social Media Strategy" but I have done that for simplicity sake to show that it is more than platforms and that it is more than a viral video. In my opinion, we don't ever talk about specific social platforms until we know what we want to do, we know where our customers are having those conversations, and we know how this fits into our overall marketing strategy. Let me know what you think. Follow me on Twitter @kevingespinosa. What has been your social media journey? I love comments...I learn a lot from them, and many of you are smarter than me so let me know your thoughts.