The first step in leveraging social media to build your business is to understand what it is. Social media is both a uniquely open communications channel and a set of highly interactive tools, which should be used to engage and communicate with a broad range of brand audiences and stakeholders.

You can employ social media to monitor the marketplace, drive a conversation, obtain feedback, and/or immediately address customer issues or misperceptions. While there are countless and creative ways to leverage social media, a good social media strategy should include the same testing, learning, scaling and measurement approach that we would use with any other effective marketing strategy.

THUNDER FACTORY's social media strategic process includes the following:

• Social media audit/assessment: Including competitive audit (what are your competitors doing in social media)
• Developing your social media strategy: Set clear objectives, the right channels and the most effective tools
• Build a strong social media infrastructure: Establish blogs, site profiles (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc), roles /responsibilities
• Set up ongoing social media monitoring for your company/brand: What are people saying about you, where and why? What does it mean? And what do we need to do about it?
• Execute the program: This is not a sprint... it is a long distance undertaking, and that requires patience and persistence
• Track and measure feedback and results: Analyze comments and conversations for tone, content, leads, issues resolved, suggestions, etc.
• Refine and scale program based on results and feedback: The point is to continuously improve the impact/effectiveness/engagement of your social media efforts

Read our Social Media Manifesto. Then contact us to join the social media conversation today.