Week 4 Reflection: Social Media Planning

In week 4 , I have learnt that why businesses need to do social media panning and the way to do social media planning. Social media planning is an important and tricky part that businesses should learn how to do. It is the beginning of the whole social media marketing chain.

Since social media planning is crucial for businesses, it is important to understand following sections: 

1) understand the social media marketing planning cycle

Social media marketing planing cycle includes 8 elements: 

2) identify ways to listen and observe the social web

In my opinion, there are five stages that businesses can do:

1. Listen to conversations about a brand or company: understand people think about the brand in positive and negative ways, find where opportunities may lie
2. Listen to what people say about the competitors: understand the pros and cons of competitors
3. Listen to what people say about the industry or category: understand the trend of the whole industry
4. Listen for the tone of the community: understand which social media applications are popular and useful
5. Listen to feedback: see users comments and collect necessary information

3) understand how to set goals and create strategies

In my view, understand everything you need, including goals, market, product, potential consumers. Then it is easier to set business goals. Then businesses can create strategies. Social media strategy includes listening, planning, engaging, integration,developing and action. Here are some tips I have learnt from power point slides:

• Understand more about your market, or your brand or product. ORM tools to track mentions and sentiment. Social network and planners give you rich information about your market.
• Consider the risk and challenges when creating a social media strategy.
• Make sure you interact where your customers are. 
• Fix problem areas if customers are unhappy.
• Budget the time required to make the strategy a success.

4) link social media goals to actions

• Social media objectives should be in line with overall business strategy. 
• Set business goals first.
• Create an action plan and implement it according to social media.
• Do not forget to track, analyse and optimise the whole plan when acting it.
• Define anticipated messages and standard responses
• Escalate social media channels, including text, audio, images, videos,etc. 
• Add contact details on social media platforms

5) differentiate between self promotion and brand/service advocates

A self promotion is an company's internal function which someone completely concentrates on study and analyze the needs of its customers, know those customers’ expectations then help their company to meet their customer needs quickly and effectively.

A brand advocate is a person that not only is a loyal consumer of your product or service, but also has a great experience and willing to share that experience with others. Loyal customers will become online influencers and their recommendations will bring awareness to the company via the millions of social media followers they may have. Thus, brand advocates play a key role in customer referrals, commonly known as word-of-mouth, marketing strategy (Kleplc, 2013; Lemes, 2017).

From the KLM video, the main purpose of this dutch airplane company tries to let their customers become influencers and willing to share airplane good information on social media. The strategy is : If clients send any information about KLM on social media like Twitter to help KLM to do advertisements, they will be received a small gift from the firm before he or she is getting aboard. The actions is : When people shared something about KLM on social media, the company will try to search their personal preferences online to guess what they may like, then give them a gift before they aboard. Nowadays, KLM becomes a functional client-engaged website which let clients and their friends to choose their own trip.

I have also learnt that how to use a checklist to develop social media plan:

• listen to yourself
• listen to others
• create persona
• map assets
• define goals
• clarify message
• select channels
• join the conversation
• listen and re-invent

I have found that how to create social media strategy from web page which is useful:

1. INTRODUCTION An introduction to your brand, and what if anything you are currently doing with social media to engage your brand.

2. COMPETITOR ANALYSIS Select one of your key competitors and put together a brief analysis of their social media presence online. Provide examples, and highlight what they are doing well and what they may not be doing well.

3. SOCIAL MEDIA OBJECTIVES An outline of the objectives you are trying to meet and why you feel social media is the best way to address these. How do you feel these align with the overall objectives of your company/brand?

4. PLATFORMS What platform(s) you plan to use to execute your strategy. Provide evidence to demonstrate that they are the most suitable choices to align with your marketing strategy.

5. ENGAGEMENT PLAN Outline how you plan to convert and engage with your customers to increased sales

6. CHALLENGES AND CONSIDERATIONS What challenges or difficulties might you encounter in rolling out your strategy?

7. TIMELINE Create a detailed timeline for the rollout of your strategy. There doesn’t have to be activity at each point but rather a justification for what is happening when.

8. CONCLUSION Do you think that your strategy would be successful in the longer term? How would you monitor success and what changes might you make?

References

Kleplc, J. (2013, August 27). Advocates or Influencers — Which Are More Important to Your Brand Marketing Success? Retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jure-klepic/advocates-or-influencers_b_3817056.html

Lemes, F. (2017). SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT: BRAND ADVOCATES VS. CUSTOMER ADVOCATES. Retrieved August 28, 2017, from https://www.questionpro.com/blog/setting-the-record-straight-brand-advocates-vs-customer-advocates/