Social Strategy: How to Build a Sustainable Social Media Marketing Plan

Do you have a social media plan?

Are you wondering how to build a social media strategy for your business?

To learn about the importance of a social media strategy, I interview Neal Schaffer for this episode of the Social Media Marketing podcast.
More About This Show

The Social Media Marketing podcast is a show from Social Media Examiner.

It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

The show format is on-demand talk radio (also known as podcasting).

In this episode, I interview Neal Schaffer, author of Maximizing LinkedIn for Sales and Social Media Marketing. He's a social media consultant and coach. His newest book is Maximize Your Social: A One-Stop Guide to Building a Social Media Strategy for Marketing and Business Success.

Neal shares the unique insights he gained while working overseas with companies that had to build their sales organizations from scratch.

You'll learn the core elements your social strategy needs to be successful and sustainable.

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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Social Media Marketing Plan
Many marketers are solely focused on the 'how' rather than the 'why' of social media

Neal states that you should operate with a plan. The most precious resource for a marketer is time. Social media can drain your time, especially with the emergence of new platforms.

You need to have a plan—and more importantly, an objective—and be able to measure what you are doing. For a small business it's one thing, but if you are doing it on behalf of a client or a brand/company, they want to know what they will get out of their social media budget.

As social media becomes a mass skill, Neal thinks we'll see a lot more corporate oversight into what people do in social media.

If you concentrate on the tactics alone, then the value of a Facebook like is meaningless. It might be a secondary metric, but at the end of the day, you need to know how it affects your business objectives. If you just look at the tactics, you completely miss the whole business picture.

As a small business owner, it's easy to get caught up in the numbers. There is more focus on the 'how,' because you can be too concerned about trying to keep up with everyone else.

You'll hear Neal give an example of a hotel client's Facebook strategy and how it's not all about the number of likes you have compared to your competitors.

Likes are important to companies that want to get brand recognition in the marketplace—although it's not a business objective, it's more brand awareness.

Listen to the show to find out why the number of likes is only one indicator in comparing yourself to your competition.

How working abroad helped Neal in the new world of social media

After graduating from college, Neal moved to Japan, where he helped three companies in the high-tech industry. Neal says it provided him with a lot of extremely holistic business experience.

He had to launch their sales organizations from scratch and had to figure out how to get brand recognition across different countries in markets where they weren't known.

These jobs included sales and marketing, attending conferences, hiring people, dealing with legal issues and offering customer support. All of these roles led Neal to a very holistic view of social media in terms of not just using it for marketing but throughout the enterprise.

You'll hear why storytelling helped strengthen these Chinese brands and Japanese technology.

Neal gained unique insights while working with these companies and it has given him a way to look at things in a practical, rational and actionable way.

Listen to the show to find out about the analogy of thinking about a social network like a country.