Lessons Learned: Starting and growing your social media program

Editor’s note: This is part 6 & 7 in the series of Lessons Learned:  Easy tips on how to create and grow a social media program.   This series includes a discussion on the following topics:

1. Create a Social Media Policy
2. Research your business
3. Set goals
4. Write an Editorial Calendar
5. Create content
6. Start the program
7. Grow your social media program and overall web presence
8. Handling mistakes and attacks

Start the program

Once you know where to start and what to say, create your online accounts on determined platforms such as Twitter, LinkedIN, Facebook, Delicious and more.

• Start posting your content
• Respond when someone replies or mentions your company/brand
• Test your messaging, modify messaging as needed
• Watch your messaging to see what resonates with your audiences.
• Time test tweets to see what time of day you receive the best

Reserve Your Name

There are more than 100+ social media sites/networks across the web.  Preserve your company name and reputation by registering for accounts across all relevant platforms.

• Knowem
• Namechk

Grow your social media program and overall web presence

There are lots of ways to use social media to build a reputation among your core users. Here is a quick lists of several individual ideas:

• Include a link to all social network platforms within all employee’s email signature
• Include a link to all social network platforms within all outbound email marketing
• Create a Google profile to ensure people can easily find you within Google search results.
• Ask all employees to update their LinkedIn with links back to your blogs, videos and more
• Answer questions in LinkedIN to enhance company position as expert in their industry
• Have your sales team determine who your prospects are, see if you are connected to any of them via LinkedIN
• Search Twitter and other key platforms to find users by location or topic follow those key to your markets
• Upload your mailing list into social network platform and invite your members to join
• Follow your prospects on Twitter – it is a great way to get involved in the conversation, and a great way to see what is important to them
• Set up RSS feeds to send you relevant industry info, share this info on all streams to show industry leadership
• Reach out to smaller social networks and discussion partnership opportunities
  • 43things
  • Diddit
  • Whrrl
  • Foursquare
• See what else is being done online!  Check out wiki.beingpeterkim.com for a great list of social media programs

Related posts:

• Lessons Learned: Easy Tips on How to Create and Grow a Social Media Program
• Lessons Learned: How to create social media content
• Lessons Learned: How to research your business
• Lessons Learned: Setting Goals in Social Media
• Lessons Learned: Mistakes and attacks in social media

Tagged as: serena ehrlich, Social Media, social media program