I recently argued against the notion that you can do social media marketing in 30 minutes a day. So, when I ran across this infographic from RazorSocial, it seemed a perfect thing to share steps to being a social media marketing success.

Now, I’m not sure being a social media marketing success really takes 18 hours a day, but it is a significant undertaking. Unfortunately, doing social media marketing halfway isn’t likely to generate half the success, but no success. Doing social media marketing successfully is like being pregnant, you can’t do it “just a little”.

Luckily, you don’t have to do it alone. Being a social media marketing success also means building a team that believes in your business. The infographic lists a number of tools to help with managing your social media marketing, plus check out our page devoted to social media marketing tools.

Steps to being a social media marketing success

Step 1: Create content

If I divide my tasks into parts of my day, I would attribute the greatest part to creating content — whether it’s a new blog post, infographic, video, newsletter, slideshare, or social media post (Tweet, Facebook Update …).

I create a content marketing calendar to ensure I have content to share at least 3 days a week. A content marketing calendar keeps you on track and makes content marketing easier.

I also use a variety of tools to help with content creation.

  • WordPress is a great CMS for creating content for your website. It plays nice with Google and, with the right plugins, makes social sharing and analytics a snap.
  • I use AWeber for email marketing because it’s very flexible, easy to use and provides tools for analytics and A/B testing, which are critical for success.
  • I love Jing, from Techsmith for screen and short video capture. It’s free, but you might also want Camtasia, their paid tool for more flexibility in creating and editing video.
  • I recently bought a subscription to PowToons, which makes easily makes animated videos. I was skeptical, but folks seem to really like them.
  • I also have a subscription to SocialEars, which really helps discover conversations on the internet to make your content creation more valuable. SocialEars recently added analytics to help improve your content marketing efforts.

Step 2: Share

Your content might go virtually unnoticed if you don’t actively share it with your social networks, subscribers, and prospects. Syndication is also becoming a common means of sharing your influence to a wider audience.

  • I use Twitter Facebook Social Share, a WordPress plugin to make sharing easy when folks visit my site. Using counters to indicate the number of shares helps with social proof.
  • I use SproutSocial to make sharing both my content and curated content easier.
  • Of course, I also share content via my email marketing programs and to prospects using Salesforce.com.
  • I also syndicate my content through Business 2 Community and Social Media Today.

Step 4: Listen

Talking, creating content, is only part of the job. You should listen more than you talk — although I find it’s less time-consuming to listen.

But, what should you listen for?

  • Sentiment – What do folks say about you and your brand. I use Trackur for this.
  • Feedly is a great tool for gathering conversations from your favorite online news and blogs in one place to make it easy to read.
  • Again, SocialEars is a great tool for listening to what influencers are saying — hence the ears in the name.

Step 5: Engage

Engagement is part a function of creating and curating valuable, non-promotional content from your RSS feed and from influencers and part a function of being engaged with your community.

Responding to comments and questions, engaging with your community by liking, commenting and sharing their posts, and being a real person online helps build engagement.

And, don’t forget opportunities to engage influencers and use guest blogging as a way to gain traction with new audiences.

Step 6: Monitor

Monitoring your performance is an integral step in improving becoming a social media marketing success.

I use a combination of:

  • Google Analytics
  • Facebook Insights
  • Pinterest Analytics
  • SproutSocial
  • SocialEars
  • Trackur

Each gives a different view of my performance. I pay attention to my metrics every day, using tools like Cognos, an IBM dashboard product, to bring everything together in 1 place to make it easier to interpret how my social media marketing is performing.

Need Help?

Whether you need a complete analytics strategy, some help with Adwords, or some consulting to optimize your existing social media marketing, we can fill your digital marketing funnel. We can help you do your own social media marketing better or do it for you with our community managers, strategists, and account executives. You can request a FREE introductory meeting or sign up for my email newsletter to learn more about social media marketing.

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