Free Social CRM Guide

5 rules to live by for your social content strategy

I picked up a copy of the new "Social CRM for Dummies" at the Adobe/Omniture Summit last week and thought I would share some of the ideas from it and alert you to it since it's available as a free download (registration required).

About the guide

You'll know the yellow "Dummies" guides. This isn't a full guide, but a free, short 50 odd page guide created for lead-generation/customers by EmailVision. I think it's still worth scanning, particularly if it's early days in developing your social CRM strategy.

Content generation and distribution strategy

I thought the guidelines on this topic were useful, so I would expand on them. The authors of the guide say that "content generation should be proactive, persistent, multichannel, relevant, high quality and two way.

Here is my guidance, prompted by these ideas, these are the 5 rules to live by when defining and implementing your content strategy:

1. Be relevant. Understand the content that will appeal to different audiences. How can you make your content useful or interesting to them? Your audience for each social channel will be different, with different interests and interests within this. Being first to break news or looking at things can help engage; don't just follow the crowd. Develop ideas for different categories of content that will appeal to your content. Then see which is most effective for response and sharing through your analytics and testing.
2. Create an editorial calendar. Your social media marketing will be more effective if you produce content on a regular, consistent schedule. A calendar plus an ideas list of future topics can help here. Even if a calendar doesn't fit the way you work, an idea of the frequency of posting new content and the types of topics will help.
3. Offer distribution choices, but keep a focus. Offer choice to alert subscribers to content using different types of channels since they will have different preferences. Of course, Facebook and Twitter are essential for consumer audiences. For business audiences, Linked In will be important, but Facebook and Twitter are becoming more important here too. It makes sense to invest the most time in your most active channels with the most subscribers, so keep a focus on these.
4. Syndicate through partners. As well as alerting followers through your own social channels, really good quality content can be shared through other networks too. Identify partner sites who may publish your content, either in it's original form or tailored for their audiences.
5. Make communications two-way. There is a danger if you have an editorial schedule of just pushing content without participating with your audiences. Don't just treat the channels as an alert or update service. Make sure that you're not just using social channels to alert the audience to new content, but you're engaging and participating too - both on your channels and those run by others. This means asking and answering questions, listening and responding to feedback.

I hope these are of interest, do you agree? Rules are made to be broken!

See this previous post for our look at alternative Social CRM Strategy models.