ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how to create a structured plan for social media marketing. It helps to review competitor use of social media to find a standard method of reviewing competitors. The chapter suggests creating a simple scorecard of how well competitors are using social media. It focuses on communications that directly increase sales through reaching or converting more of an audience. Creating the content assets is only one crucial part of social media marketing. The process of outreach and seeding to share these assets is an equally important aspect, but is perhaps less easy to control, so it is often useful to outsource this activity. A content strategy defines the types of content assets one need to develop to engage their target audiences through the customer lifecycle. A communications strategy will be very familiar to marketers. One key difference with social media marketing is that one will be communicating much more frequently than with traditional press releases or e-newsletters.
