As we enter into a new fresh year, I have been getting a few questions about using social media in a meaningful and engaging manner. Here are a few thoughts from conversations I have had with clients who have asked us to assist them with their social media strategies.

Evaluate Your Efforts
So you have a Facebook Fan Page and are using Twitter on a regular basis. You might have even uploaded a couple videos to Youtube and you have completed your Linkedin profile. This is great progress, but there’s more.

Take a minute to review your current social media strategies with a scorecard approach. Have you driven new traffic to your web site? Have you successfully offered a new, trackable promotion with a code?

It’s also important to take a look at your competition and their social media efforts. Create a grid with your top five competitors and review their presence and engagement on Facebook, Twitter and Youtube. Share this information with your marketing/communications team to determine opportunities for your strategies.

Create a Social Media Team
When you started the social media efforts, it was probably new and maybe a little fun. Now it might be turning into…just one more thing to do each day.

Have you thought about creating a Social Media Team?
Do an internal audit to see who is using social media regularly on their own time and ask those colleagues or even volunteers if they want to help. Of course, they will need training and will need to be brought up to speed on the objectives, key messages and strategies from your plan. Once you recruit the team, provide them with assignments and deadlines just like they are reporters. Keep an eye on the posts, tags and photos but empower them to connect with your community.

Tag, You’re It! And Google Knows It.
As we all know, it’s all about Google. This is just a quick reminder to tag all social media content with your key words, i.e. company name, positioning statements, key leadership and industry key words. It’s also important to edit videos and photos posted to Youtube and Flickr, respectively.

Create Your Own Social Media Newsroom
Now that you have been creating a social media community of followers and fans, you might have the opportunity to take your social media game up a notch. Here are two new strategies we are deploying on behalf of clients.

With milestone events or special occasions, we have been using our social media platforms as newsrooms to communicate and engage our e-communities. You may consider launching the newsroom during a special annual event, a new product launch or with a seasonal approach. All this means is that you can appoint “reporters” to capture and share content with your community during this milestone opportunity. It might mean you have several reporters covering all aspects of a Marathon from the Expo to the Kid’s Races to the Pasta Party and ultimately, Race Day. You can also use the newsroom to interact with your community to answer timely questions or provide additional content based on their requests. Before you launch the newsroom, be sure to let the community know that you are so they don’t get bombarded by your stream of content.

The social media release
I encourage you to visit www.pitchengine.com and spend some time creating a social media release. This new platform is one of the best tools since the invention of the on-line media database aggregator. With this free tool, you can create your own social media release which is a standard release with photos, links to videos and social media sites, among other fun features. You can also create a tiny url with all of the content so you don’t have to clog up a reporter’s in box with photos, etc. Lastly, you can share your release to other social media sites like Facebook, Linkedin and others.

Monitor Your Platforms
Social media at its best is about genuine and transparent communication. Just as you check your email, you need to check your social media platforms to respond to “tweets,” comments and/or other blog posts.

A few quick and easy tools that help are Google Alerts for traditional media, blog posts, and a variety of social media posts, mostly Twitter. I also manage Twitter on my laptop and smart phone using Tweetdeck, a free application download.

If you need assistance in discussing strategies for your social media efforts, please feel free to contact me at Jackie Reau, jreau@gamedaypr.com or (513) 929-4263.