Social Media is a marketing team’s dream — where else would you find your target market all in one place? Facebook has over 2 billion registered users… the World’s population is 7.3billion. But, with such a large potential audience, it also lends itself to what can look like a very cluttered noticeboard. Your aim as a marketer is to make your piece of paper stand out more than everyone else’s.

When developing your strategy to use Social Media as a marketing tool, keep the following ideas in mind…

Social Media shouldn’t be thought of as a place you need to be just because everyone else is there.

Do you have the time and resources to maintain these channels daily? Until you are ready to invest extra personnel or outside agency services don’t start building a community online. If you can’t look after them with a level of customer service you believe in and respects that Social Media a global, online and a 24/7 responsibility, you need to wait.

When you are ready to invest time and resources, the first thing you need to look at is your company’s Sales & Marketing goals and objectives for the year ahead.

Your Social Media Marketing Strategy should be driven by the same overall aim. All of your campaigns, ideas and thought process for creating content to post on social media need to go through the same overall aim filter first. Would you create a print or TV campaign without going through this process? Probably not!

While Social Media is a great sales tool asset, it is definitely a place that suits a soft sell rather than a hard sell approach.

There are 500million tweets sent globally every day — people start to get a little choosy about what they invest their time in reading so don’t make all your content about you and your product. Think of platforms like Twitter, more as a place to exercise all those notes in your CRM system rather than an advert spot in a magazine to quote rates and deals. There is a real opportunity to develop relationships with clients, suppliers, competitors and your wider community to help raise an overall brand awareness.

Social Media dares us all to be a little bit spontaneous with the possible reward of something going spectacularly viral — go on, live a little!

Tweet me your tweeting questions @aoifemccrum