Implementing a social media campaign needs thought and much planning to ensure the end outcome is the desired one:

Initial research: Find out what people are saying about your brand on the most popular social networks for your country as well as general business information. Track and monitor what is said and check out competition, find out what they are doing and record anything interesting (search results, feedback etc), which you may be able to implement at a later stage in the process.

Goals: What goals are already set in your business? What is it you want to achieve? Have you achieved it yet? How can social networking and a social campaign help/assist you to achieve your goals?
Research how you will achieve your goals and how you will track each step you have made in order to achieve a positive outcome or to tailor it to work better. Ensure the goals you set out to achieve are monitored closely so you can make the most impact on your campaign.

Tools: Try out the range of different tools on the web, discover which tools best suit the needs for your reporting and meet the needs of your goals, use several if that suits the needs of helping you to achieve your goal – creating a mix gives the best of every world – always research for new innovative tools on a regular basis as there are APIs being created all the time!

Performance measuring: There are many ways in which you can measure your performance – using tools on the web which will track your social media campaigns or develop your own in-house tools, monitor this on a regular basis so you can adapt your strategy to achieve your goals – remember – the results may not be what you’d hoped they would be.

Reporting: Create your own reports using the data you have gathered along the way, ALWAYS include positive and negative remarks as they provide a basis for development or help choose which direction needs to be tailored, the positive will show where you have got the direction right to help achieve your set goal and strategy.

An important factor is to remember that a social media strategy is not set in stone, it can be changed! Once you start your social campaign it is very difficult to go backwards if you have a sudden change of mind or direction. Make sure your research is thorough and you are confident with all you have set out to do – there is always plenty of help to be found so don’t be afraid to seek it out!

Is a picture worth a thousand tweets? Quite possibly

I loathe seeing pictures of myself appearing in the public domain. Vain enough to do vanity searches, realistic enough to recognise that I’m not particularly photogenic, I’ve chosen in the past to use meaningless alias pictures wherever possible.

When I set up my Twitter account I used one of my favourite pictures of a wind-up robot holding up a pencil (see below) for my profile picture – it expresses how I feel some days!

This remained for over a year of intermittent and non-strategic Twitter usage, during which time I picked up 280 followers who were happy to follow my occasional rants about Google News, blatant RTs of press releases and WebCertain news, along with the odd, daft discussions about celebrities and ancient pop music.

Like many people with a corporate, yet personal, Twitter profile my Tweets are somewhat random, despite the advice I would give anyone – you must define what you are about on Twitter and stick to it!

I could have ruthlessly pursued building up more followers by keywording my Tweets and following the key influencers in my sector, but, really life is too short…

One simple step has made my follower numbers jump up in just a few days.

I’ve deleted the cute robot and replaced it with a real picture of myself. It’s a rather simpering pose, but I still feel  safe in my anonymity as it’s fairly heavily photoshopped – yet it is still a recognisable human (female) face and it is encouraging more people to follow me.

In four days of continuing with my unexciting and infrequent Tweeting, I picked up just over 20 new Twitter followers. In the old days of the robot, I would have maybe found 5 more people following me.

Interestingly, a number of people who I kind-of-know from conferences and the search marketing sector are now following me. I haven’t targeted anyone, I haven’t changed any other details on my profile page and I even Tweeted in French at one point… (I am not French).

Pretty obvious stuff maybe, but the rule seems clear –

If you are a corporate Tweeter – use a company logo
If you are a person (with a name) – use a picture

Whatever you do, don’t choose a robot for your profile picture…