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Revising a Small Business Social Media Strategy
January 27, 2012 | posted by Amber
We are at a point where our old social media strategy is no longer working for us.
Our Strategy from 2010 — Now
Let’s look at where the business was and what we were doing.
The business
We started in 2006, Steve joined full time in Fall 2008 and I followed in Spring 2009. We were just getting going and we made a detour. Fast forward to the end of 2010. We were exiting a startup partnership and woke up to very little work on and a scarce amount of money. The economy was in the tank, but we needed to drum up business.
We revised our website first and foremost. Your website is your home base for everything else. Then we put the following strategy into place.
- We have a twitter account for our business (click here to follow @sawayaconsult). We were posting a few times a day.
- We were reviewing everyone that followed us and following almost everyone back.
- We read all the tweets that came through.
- We performed a series of searches daily to find people that were looking for what we had to offer. We picked up a few great projects and met some new people this way.
- We have a Facebook page for our business (like us here).
- We didn’t post to it very often.
- We did hook up our blog to it.
- We posted some images from our portfolio to Facebook. This actually posed another problem I’ll talk about below.
Blog
- We were rocking the blog.
- We were posting series, we had a great posting schedule (series on Tuesdays, whatever on Fridays).
- We had some fantastic Google rankings because of it.
The Benchmark Right Now
This strategy was great for the time. It’s not working anymore because:
- Our business is crazy awesome busy. We are building some really cool corporate tools, we’re doing a ton of web and mobile apps. We have another developer working here full time and are looking to round out with another Android developer and looking at bringing another designer in on several projects.
- We haven’t kept our portfolio up to date (see top bullet point). Posting portfolio images to Facebook was slowing us down — we were quadruple posting our work to our blog, our site, Behance and Facebook — each piece with it’s own resolution and support in graphics. Too daunting. Didn’t get finished.
- We haven’t kept up blogging, sort of due to time, sort of due to having no blog focus. Is our blog for clients? potential clients? other designers/developers? is anyone but Google listening? Does it matter if no one else is? Overwhelming questions when you’d rather be building a new interface for an awesome client project.
- We haven’t been blogging so our SEO has tanked. Hard core. But it’s hard to worry about the phone not ringing all the time when it IS RINGING ALL THE TIME. New people are still finding us — and our existing clients are doing more and more projects with us. And unlike so many service companies (looking at you telco and TV providers) our existing clients are more important than potential new clients. We give them the best and only take on more if there is anything left over.
- We haven’t even been reviewing new twitter followers, haven’t been reading tweets beyond the private list of “friends in RL”. We hardly tweet. Again, see top bullet — but also add in a sprinkling of overwhelming.
So there is a mix of reasons and excuses. There are a few things we need to straighten out to be ready to implement a new strategy. These are:
- Update our portfolio. Not only is it out of date, but it grew organically (like a weed) and looks bad. We are revising it, adding some sorting and moving our client list to a new page. That is about 80% complete.
- Clean up Twitter. See who is following us, see who we need to follow back. Organize some new lists and check those lists that are most interesting to us regularly. We can do this in Hootsuite. I will start working on that today.
- Either pick a blog focus or don’t pick a blog focus—but make that choice. I’m going to say that we aren’t going to focus on one audience. We are going to continue to post whatever is interesting to us, relevant to our business, and/or helpful for people (our how to articles that are unrelated to our business drive the most traffic, but zero conversions). Also, we need to accept that if we aren’t going to focus, we aren’t going to grow a huge audience and therefore not have huge blog numbers—but it all helps drive SEO. More water in the harbor, all the boats rise.
The new strategy for 2012
The business
As far as I can see, we’re going to be busy. We’re going to add capacity as we can and be grateful every day for what we have and where we’ve come from. We’re going to stay just hungry enough (like I could eat a string cheese, not like I’m starving and want to eat a horse) to make sure we stay on our game, and we keep making clients ecstatic.
- Organize into lists. I’ll have another blog post on this in the future.
- Interact with lists as appropriate.
- Check daily – tweet daily.
- The way our blog posts to Facebook looks overwhelming (text comes through in a big block). I’m either going to find a better plugin or hand manage this.
- Clean up our photo sections — but just repost from our website, no customization.
- Create a custom Page.
- Tie into Facebook-specific features. Run an ad, run a poll, maybe a contest. See what comes of it.
Blog
- Get back to posting, at least once a week. This needs to be a priority—prep the ground for gardening so it’s ready when you need it. If we make Thursday our goal posting day, and I make sure that I write on Friday or the weekend for the next week (for those times that I don’t have a bunch of them ready to go) then we should be good.
- Look at syndicating some articles if only to provide an extra focus/motivation.
I’ll report back after this has been underway for a while! Is it time to revamp your company’s social media strategy? What changes are you planning to make?
This work includes the photo “Ranger Rendezvous,” available under a Creative Commons Attribution license, © The U.S. Army.
