We are still in the early days of 2012 and now is the right time to plan your digital marketing strategy for the new year. By now, you likely have your Facebook Fan Page and Twitter profile setup for your business, connected with each other, and updating your network on a regular basis with interesting news and information.
Maybe you don’t have as many targeted followers in your network as you would like, but a new year brings lots of new opportunities. Now is also a great time to expand on your social media marketing initiative.
Planning for 2012
What are you planning for 2012? This will all depend on what you want to accomplish with your business. Your digital marketing strategy will differ from those of other companies, but if you are looking for a couple of ideas to get the snowball rolling, have a look below.
Dead profiles
Remove all your dead profiles. Do you have a couple of social profiles that you don’t use? Maybe you have set up profiles on all the popular social media channels when you started such as Flickr and MySpace but you are not using them. Consider deleting the profiles you are not using and that you haven’t updated in a couple of months. It looks very unprofessional on a Web 2.0 profile with no activity going on. Either delete these profiles or revive them by feeding another RSS activity feed into it.
Design
Are you happy with your Facebook profile photo and Twitter background? Maybe now is a good time to change the design of your profiles as most of the social media channels have changed their profiles over the last year. Your current design may no longer suit these interface changes and requires a makeover.
Facebook tabs
Are you still using FBML (Facebook Markup Language) for custom tabs on your Facebook Fan page? FBML support will eventually go away so you must fix your tabs. Make sure that you are familiar with the Facebook Developer site for making tabs, and that you have a server available with https support to host your pages.
Engage
Make sure that you engage more with people in your online social circle. Once a day, I recommend you commit yourself to the following:
- Respond to person’s Twitter update
- Retweet one update
- Use Facebook as your Facebook page persona and comment on another Facebook page
- Use Google Plus as your Google Plus page persona and comment on another Google Plus page
- Share a status update from another member on Google Plus
- Comment on a relevant blog post
- Comment on a relevant YouTube video
Social media marketing is more than just promoting your own content. Put the social back in your campaigns and start engaging with others.
Personality
Never be afraid to show your sense of humor. One doesn’t always plan to go viral with a blog post, video or a tweet, but when it happens it is because it was worth sharing. You don’t have to be the king of Web 2.0, but if you relax once in a while you can show people a new side of your business that they will want to follow and know.
What are your social media resolutions for 2012?