Planning a Social Media Campaign - A Guide For Publishers

 Planning a Social Media Campaign for Publishing - a quick overview

How to start

Ok, let's assume you're fully on board with Social Media now; the huge benefits are for another article...... So where do you start? To start with as a publisher you'll need to go through the titles you wish to promote through Social Media shivangi joshi. Obviously all publishers of different sizes operate in different ways, larger publishers can have different marketing departments for different areas. This actually makes their life slightly easier since it clearly defines the paths forward. For those who have one marketing department for many titles, you then involve some serious decisions to make. 

Segmentation

Inside our opinion Social Networks should target niche audiences and having generic social networking pages, on which networks, will really not do you any favours. As we have with one client, currently (we're trying to move them from this) their feeds can be telling you information regarding craft one moment and then horror films the next. This really doesn't encourage niche followers/fans etc, why can you follow a feed similar to this if you're just really thinking about craft. Of course greater branded publishers, i.e. Penguin, have less to be worried about here as they have great brand affinity. And a few of you may have this too, but it could still allow you to get into trouble. We're not suggesting you don't have corporate pages just that should you, develop niche ones too. There are many of tools (such as ping.fm) that will allow you to work the corporate page at the same time frame whilst the niche pages.

Our suggestion is to segment around you can the truth is manage on a day to day basis, this provides you the most effective potential for having a niche audience and becoming a specialist in your subject matter. 

Which Networks

Once you've reached this time, some decisions need to be made about where to pay your time, i.e. is it growing audiences on Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Friendfeed, Myspace, Bebo etc etc. There are always a large amount of large social networking networks available, but also hundreds if not tens of thousands of smaller ones. This short article isn't about delving into which one's are most relevant for your target audiences, that would take far too long!!

Goals and objectives

So you should really sit down and assess the goals and objectives for your campaign. Goals and objectives are actually two different things. Goals are your wider intentions which should fit closely with your company or general marketing plan and could include return on investment, brand / series awareness etc. Objectives are day to day activities that will allow you to reach your goals. For example an objective could be to attain 2,000 twitter followers in X number of months. 

Making an activity plan, or not!

When you've selected where you're going to pay your time and what your goals and objectives are, do you only delve in and get on with it or do you only do. Well the right answer is to make a plan, but the truth is, if you're a small publisher doing all this off your personal in those days hey you will want to dip your toe in and grow your knowledge and reach as you do. However always always always look at your audiences even if you are simply planning to dip your toe in, there's no point having a small audience in one area only to possess to move them to another. We've seen this happen quite a few times and it surely takes you many steps back.

If you're choosing the planning method, and want a fast way to complete after that it among the easiest ways to complete it is to create a worksheet with the social networking avenues there are and what you plan to do with each one, if anything. 

Time Allocation

Now - once you've worked out what you're going to complete, you should allocate some time and energy to it like all marketing plans. Many individuals will show you to allocate 2 hours each day or 1 day weekly to social networking in blocks. But quite bluntly this really is wrong. Social networking just doesn't work that way! It's like grazing, people pop in and out of it. You'll see some posting 10 times between 9-11am because that's what they do. However social networking is a conversation between you and many, not only you shouting. If people respond to your posts on any network you need to be there to connect to them always. So although you need to plan to allocate time, this time must be grazed throughout the week. At any time, you need to expect you'll need to make use of your social networks. 

Using other internal resources to help

You'll find as you obtain into Social Media that you can't get it done all on your own, and not only that, but you should think about whether there are people within your company which are actually far better qualified to fairly share your niche areas than you are. These could be your Editors, Writers, Publishers etc. Use them. Not only that but plan them into your activities and allocate tasks to them. Effectively you'll need to start project managing those around one to help. We'd recommend sending out a Social Media memo or arranging a seminar, which we've done before, to see other members of staff about what Social Media is and how they are able to help. Probably a good thing to complete is dictate for them some structure, i.e. they are the networks I'd like one to involve yourself in and we'd like to complete x number of unique tasks per day / week / month etc.

Some other things to think about

There is so much more to developing a cultural media plan that it would go onto additional pages! Some other things to think about are research, competitor activities, content generation, blogs, engagement strategies, integration along with your overall marketing plan and much more. Hopefully this short article has given you a begin in the proper direction.