What’s your social media strategy?

Its not enough to just “have” a social media presence. Again, its not something you can set-and-forget. Chances are if you haven’t touched your Twitter account in a couple of weeks or worse yet – months – anyone who happens upon your Twitter, Facebook page and even your website will not be enticed to stick around, perhaps even unfollowing/fanning. Buh-bye potential customer.

What makes social media work for businesses such as restaurants, bars, wine shops, and the like is the same thing that works for big business – putting together a social media strategy. Like a marketing plan, but for your social presence. Some businesses might consider outsourcing their social marketing to create a solid, manageable social strategy. As long as you as the owner, manager or marketer are taking every step of the social strategy process alongside your consultant (so you understand what’s happening) this might be the best option from a time-management perspective.

Even if you’ve been active on social channels for some time, its always a good time to enact or revisit a solid strategy, set goals, and gauge your effectiveness.

Consider the following tips for enacting a strategy for your establishment. Lots of ideas here, but they are all essential to getting the most bang for your social buck.

What’s your strategy?

Setting goals

From the very basic goals of follower and fan counts, to more robust measurements like targeted Facebook ad impressions, website traffic, coupon redemption or event participation, knowing your starting point and where you’d like to be at set dates in the future is key to seeing how your social media participation is working. Google Analytics not only tracks website traffic and trends, but also has goal-setting features that let you see how your campaigns, keywords and impressions are reaching searchers and website visitors.

Getting found

Get your Google profile set up or updated and plugged full of keywords and information that will help you attract your desired market. Verify your establishment’s bio information on review sites like Yelp, TripAdvisor, your local review sites, community membership descriptions, and your Twitter and Facebook pages. Those bios are opportunities for keywords. If you haven’t already, sign up for an account on location based application web hubs like Foursquare, Gowalla, etc.

If you haven’t already, secure your business name as a vanity URL (web address) for your Facebook account. Its so much easier to promote Facebook.com/YourWateringHole than a long URL chock full of numbers, letters and other characters. Looks a lot better on a menu, too. GMore on promoting your social presence in the last tip.

Offering good content on your website

Its all good to point fans and followers to your website, after all that is one of the goals here – to entice them with your menu, events, wine list, etc. and ultimately bringing them through the front door. This means you better have something worth looking at when they get to the site. An attractive design, easy navigation, how to find you, menus, events, and even commentary about your place in the community.

You can accomplish that last point with a blog. Regular short updates about what’s happening, images, event promotions and recaps, accolades, etc. Setting up an editorial calendar (Couple of posts a week? What topics?) can really help keep the blog in action and on search engine radar. If your website hasn’t had a makeover in the past couple of years – its time. If you aren’t contributing to your own site via a blog – start writing.

Adding fresh content to your Facebook fan page

Post regularly* about your weekly specials, special events, your participation in food festivals and shows, tastings, chef accolades, cooking classes, wine list additions, new baby for a staffer, tweet ups, customer recognition, community events, charities you support, local festivals, favorite food and bev vendors – the list goes on and is literally endless.

*once a day is the norm – more than once or twice and you may be saturating your fans, prompting them to leave your FB community

Mari Smith has an in depth post on the myriad ways your Facebook fan pages can explode, over on SocialMediaExaminer.com.

Participating in conversations

Ideally you are talking about more than just your weekly specials to your Twitter and Facebook community. Remember, social media isn’t for SELLING something, its about building relationships, brand advocates, trust, and making connections with an audience of like-minded people. The sales (butts in seats, etc) will come, just as they would if you ran a successful television ad, radio spot or print ad. The difference is you get to reach out to individuals in your community and industry (followers, fans or not) and chime in. Answer a question someone in your neighborhood tweeted. Ask a question to a community leader you follow. Comment on a blog or Facebook article posted by someone you admire. Putting your name and commentary out there is reciprocal, and can establish you as a thought leader in your own right.

One side note about starting and taking part in conversations: when you tweet, retweet, blog, and comment on stories, you’re doing so as a real person – not a brick-and-mortar building. Social media adds a human voice to a business or organization. People respond to real people, not robots or auto-responders.

Beefing up your media channels

As mentioned above, be sure your YouTube, Flickr, or other media platforms have very robust ‘about’ information. Use appropriate keywords and absolutely add a variety of ‘tags’ to each and every article you upload. These sites are all search engine gold when you tag your images and videos with the name of your establishment, the event, city, product – whatever you are trying to market. You can also add tags to these same files when uploading to Facebook. Facebook also allows a video to feature a layover “Become a Fan” (or “Like” these days) right on your video for viewers who are not yet fans (current fans will not see the layover). Read more about the Facebook video Like button »

Promoting your social voices

There are dozens of ways to get the message out that you are indeed on Twitter, Facebook, etc. Add your Twitter and Facebook names to your printed materials like menus, business/punch cards, tv, radio and print advertising, take out menus, cocktail napkins, coasters, etc. Any place your logo and web address are, so should your social pages. You can get creative, too. See what Lake Champlain Chocolates (@LCChocolates – a retail chocolate shop in Burlington, VT) created to promote their social playgrounds to customers (link).

Probably the most obvious place to link to your social accounts is your website. Every page, easy to locate on those pages. Take a look at this fantastic example of a restaurant’s “location” page. 156 Bistro (@156bistro) has listed more than just a mailing and email address. They’re taken measures to find out every place their customers might be looking online. They’ve told us where they’ve planted their flag.

What strategies have worked for you? What can you add to this list for the do-it-yourself social media participant?

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