Social Media: Strategy or Tactic?

Is your business on Facebook? Do you tweet? Haven’t you heard? OMG! Social media is the gr8test way 2 market ur biz 2day, LOL!

In today’s age of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, blogs and other means of social networking, businesses are eager to jump in and win their share of the online audience. Thus, you often hear about a company’s “social media strategy.”

The problem with this line of thinking is that social media is a tactic, not a strategy. You can have a strategy for using social media to achieve specific goals, but social media itself is a means by which you can achieve those goals.

Before you accuse me of transforming into some sort of pedantic marketing curmudgeon who’s splitting hairs, I’ll explain what I mean.

If your company has joined the social networking bandwagon, how did it go about doing so? Did someone just create Twitter and Facebook accounts and start posting, or did a team sit down and try to determine the ways in which social networking could work for the company?

Companies that want to reap the benefits of social media sit down and say, “Let’s figure out what we want social media to do for us.” The answers may be diverse: Perhaps you want to attract a younger customer demographic or reinvigorate the company’s image. Maybe you want to target a specific group of consumers via niche social networking sites, such as BlackPlanet.com or BabyCenter.com. Or maybe you want to open communication with and encourage participation among your customers and stakeholders.

Your reasons for using social media form your strategy — your plan for what goals your company will achieve. The way you go about achieving those goals — social networking sites, blogs, etc. — are the tactics you employ.

For most companies, “social media” is not the goal; increasing customers and profits, as well as creating more engaging and lasting customer relationships is. While social media can indeed help you meet your goals, it’s important never to lose sight of why you are using it — your strategy — and to always make sure that your social media tactics effectively support your strategy.

Here’s an example: I recently read a blog post on PRSarahEvans.com wherein she received an e-mail from a social media user who had just created a Facebook account but couldn’t figure out how to adjust the user settings to disallow followers to leave comments. If social media is anything, it’s social — and you can’t be social if you’re talking at your audience. The point of this tool is to open up conversations with your users, customers or clients, not to provide a one-sided sounding board for all of the information you want them to know. That’s what your website is for.

If this social media user’s intent was to attract social networkers as customers using the tools they are most familiar with, then he or she should have been prepared to open up two-sided communication with those prospects. Disallowing them to comment on your Facebook page is akin to taping their mouths shut while you ramble on and on. Eventually, they’ll just walk away and go where they can talk freely.

This social media user also brings to light two aspects of social networking that businesses must be prepared to incorporate into their social media strategies. The first is that social networking takes time. Even online relationships don’t happen overnight. You must nurture your social networking relationships, allowing them to thrive and grow. Preventing your followers to openly comment on your social networking pages stifles them and your relationship with them.

The second thing is that businesses must be prepared to manage these relationships in a public forum. Not every comment on your Facebook wall will be, “I love your company/products!” It’s only natural that a company receives some negative feedback, and it’s crucial to determine how you will deal with this. For example, if a follower posts a negative comment or a complaint on your Facebook wall, look into the issue and try to remedy the situation by responding. Whether you offer a sincere apology, a discount on the customer’s next purchase or a replacement product, you can take advantage of the public forum to show other customers how much they mean to your business.

Both of these aspects require time spent on social networks and time spent managing social networking pages, which is why increasingly more companies are soliciting agencies for help with their social media strategies.

Social media can be a powerful marketing tactic, but it’s just that. In order to make it work for your business, you must first design a strategy for using it effectively.