I was due to run a Social Media Marketing workshop yesterday with about 40 people at the Chill Factore in Manchester.

However, the unexpected amounts of snow meant that it was totally impossible.

I was looking forward to helping people decide whether Social Media Marketing was right for their business. And then if it was showing them strategies to use to make the most of it, whilst not taking all their time.

Why Use Social Media Marketing?

Firstly most businesses already use one form of social media marketing, also known as business networking. Where you go to meetings to talk with other people.

The reason you should test whether social media marketing is right for you is because it’s become another marketing channel and people may expect you to use it.

The Problem With Social Media Marketing

There are so many different ways to get involved with social networking. As I’ve said before, just some of those ways include:

1. LinkedIn
2. Blogging
3. Squidoo
4. Hubpages
5. Digg
6. Facebook
7. Reddit
8. Stumbleupon
9. YouTube

And on, and on…

So how do you decide what to do, when to do it or even how to do it?

Funnily enough my audience would have discovered exactly that!

The What, When And How Of Social Media Marketing

The first thing to is to decide what you want this type of marketing to achieve. That’s part of the what. Remember it’s internet based but can be used in every other marketing channel you have too.

The next ‘what’ is decide what you want to say, and who you’re going to say it to to meet your goal(s).

And the final part of the ‘what’ is to decide which tools can communicate your message most effectively.

There’s much more to it than that but for the moment let’s go on to ‘When’. The question that arises is when should we do this type of marketing. The simple answer to that is when you have something to communicate with your chosen audience.

Notice that I’ve been saying “with your chosen audience” and not “to your chosen audience” and the reason is that your audience is in a conversation with you. And they have the ability to simply stop the conversation dead.

If you simply broadcast stuff to them all the time it’s not a conversation.

Lastly we come to ‘How’ to communicate with them. This comes down to having a social media policy, choosing who will use social media on behalf of the company (ideally all of your employees) and then working out the most effective times to do it and the expected amount of time people should invest in working with social media.

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