In order to envision a social media plan for your business, you must have a good understanding of what the many social media sites have to offer. If you have been following our daily series on Social Media, then you most likely are starting to develop a strong foundation from which you can build your plan.
As the sixth and final article on our social media series, today’s post again explores the analogy of social media as stores in a shopping mall. If you have not yet done so, I would highly recommend you read these five posts prior to beginning this article:
- Social Media – The Shopping Mall Analogy
- Social Media For Business Applications
- Businesses Need Social Media
- Choosing Social Media Solutions For Your Business
- Delivering Social Media For Business
In our analogy, we compare the internet with “the mall to end all malls.” The internet is where the world is moving to engage in commerce, and the best stores in the mall are setting up to take advantage of the known traffic patterns and consumer shopping behaviors.
Yesterday, we saw how WordPress, Blogger, Paypal and Alexa fit into the shopping mall analogy, today we’ll end this series in the mall with a few final thoughts on the stores you will find:
- Godaddy – If you want a place at the mall, you have to work a deal with one of a few companies engaged by the mall to lease space. You can’t just name your store anything you want, you have to first determine its availability with an accredited domain-name registrar . You must also select your store’s specific location with a web hosting provider (like Godaddy, Hostgator, Dreamhost, etc.). The wise marketing professional looks through the archives of google to come up with ideas for names that will help the store get traffic from some of the services in the mall.
- Ezinearticles – The mall has a PR service for stores to make announcements about changes and new products. Unlike past PR services that exposed information to a tight-knit group of people, online PR organizations are geared to be in Google’s field of vision right away. If properly utilized, a press release campaign (crafted with search engine optimization in mind) can do wonders in promoting a business in the mall.
- Aweber – The post office in the mall is hidden behind the scenes, but don’t let “out of site” equate to “out of mind.” A mega-mall post office is not for the customers, rather it serves the rest of the stores. This service helps to maintain the massive lists of customers that are gained through affiliation (location) in the Mall. Aweber maintains the database of customer names and email addresses, and serves as the central mail hub for email follow-up campaigns. The successful marketer knows that “the money is in the list,” so the company that manages the flow to and from the list is the backbone of every company in the mall.
- You – A progressive internet marketing plan opens your store in the Mall, and now all you have to do is induce the traffic walking by your storefront to take a sample of your offerings. Like with anything else, if they like what they see, they will be open to further dialogue and additional offerings.
I hope this analogy of a shopping mall has helped you envision the pieces that you need to assemble in your social media plan. It might seem quite daunting at first, but if you prepare a plan and then implement one social media element at a time, you will find yourself far out in front of your competition in a relatively short period of time.
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