Your social media budget is by far the most motivating (read pushing) thing for you to keep up with the online social trends. It is a tight budget and you need to scoop up the creme-de la-creme.
You can go crazy and just add and add. Or sit and wait until people follow and like. But what is the practical step-by-step process to find the people who will be useful to your social campaigns? Who will republish what you do, boost what you do, help you grow?
It's time you take control. While you open your arms wide for every single breath of a customer on the planet, focus on engaging with the few right people.
Finding The Few:
1) First, know all those people who can influence your marketing strategy. Who are they? Categorize people into:
- Prospects
- High Quality Leads
- Regular Customers
2) Are they on social media? What social media does each of these use?
Go to the popular social media sites and conduct a search using keywords for your product, your company, your competitors, their clients.
3) Select two to three of these sites which have the most influencers. Make your company profile on those sites. Create an amiable persona on each of them.
4) Make a list of your influencers and their social media contact (URLs to their profiles, e-mail ids, etc.).
5) Connect: Take different approaches for each of those categories. Why do you need these people?
To Market: You need to connect to Prospects
To Make and Maintain Sales: You need to connect to High Quality Leads
To Achieve Customer Satisfaction: You need to connect to Regular Customers
6) Add and follow your prospects and high-quality leads to keep up-to-date with their needs.
Regular customers will follow your company profile themselves for all the offers you post.
Use connection tools like HootSuite to connect with them on different social media.
Refine your lists every month.
7) Build relationships with these contacts.
Social media is a great place to find conversations about your company. Don't miss these opportunities; when you find them, jump right in! You will definitely find something you could improve upon.
Right People With The Right Tools
1) Klout:
One way to go on about getting to the right people is to use Klout.
Klout is an online tool for building influence. This is what they have to say about Influence:
"It's great to have lots of connections, but what really matters is how people engage with the content you create. We believe it's better to have a small and engaged audience than a large network that doesn't respond to your content.
You can add all your social networks to your profile to calculate your influence in terms of Klout Score. And thus, find out the social media where you have the most influence.
Plus, you can search, and add your influencers as suggested by Klout (along with their Klout Score)!
2) FollowerWonk
A Twitter Analytics that helps you find, analyze and optimize your influencers. It is free to use for Moz users.
Finding Influencers
Comparing competitors
It uses Social Authority as a metric for influence. Other than searching and analyzing your competitors' metrics, you also have the option to look at and after your own followers.
3) SocialBro
Get to the target audience and engage with them through your SocialBro. Again this one is only for Twitter traffic.
Keep In Mind
The most important thing to keep in mind is to learn. Once you know your right influencers and how to serve them, learn and come back again next month with an even better plan. More and more tools spring up to keep track of influencers and your services. And remember that social media is all about communicating online, which is more convenient in today's busy lives. Make the most of it.