BritMums Live! Reporters – Creating a social media plan that works for you

Creating a Social Media Plan that Works – Make a strategy, use best practices and get results
Presenter: Claire Burdett

Reporter: Gillian Nove

I was really looking forward to this session as I work in social media and it’s always interesting to hear what other industry specialists have to say on the subject. I like to meet others and learn about their tips and techniques. It was well attended with lots of bloggers standing up near the back of the room, so it would seem that I wasn’t the only one keen to discover some social media nuggets!

Claire was a good speaker, very calm and well prepared. Her experience certainly came across throughout the presentation. She was happy to take questions throughout and if the answers started to get too technical, then she arranged to meet the person afterwards for a more in depth chat. This meant that the session kept its flow very nicely. She regularly asked for feedback from the audience which ensured good and frequent interaction.

The presentation that Claire gave us was quite focused on the theory behind the plan and much of it was to get people really thinking about why they want or need to use social media. So the first slide was focusing on why it’s important to make a plan. There are lots of good reasons for this, some being that it saves time, increases effectiveness, enhances engagement and creates a circle of goodness. This was a theme that Claire came back to a number of times – the “circle of goodness”.

Claire told us that it was important to get the knowledge – about your product or service, about your customers or readers and about what works and (sometimes more importantly) what doesn’t work. It’s really important to establish who your audience is. Without this, it’s so much harder to build your social media plan.

Another top tip from Claire was to clearly prioritise which networks you will choose. There are so many social networks these days that it’s not unusual to try them all, but cover yourself too thinly and not perform well with any of them. It’s much more effective to choose a selection and build those up before considering moving into any new ones.

Claire was able to suggest a number of free online services to help with your social media planning, such as Hootsuite (for timed posts), Social Mention (for basic monitoring), Twitter Karma and Twitter Cleaner (for tidying up your followers and those you’re following). Monitoring and analysis is an important part of the plan, along with checking out your competitors on a regular basis.

Prior to the presentation Claire had put a shout out via social media for blogs to have a look at. A number of people had got back in touch, so she’d reviewed 2 of them and both of those bloggers were in the room. She highlighted the key points from each and gave them both some advice, which was really interesting.

I think the only piece of feedback I could have offered for this session was for us to be able to have a look at a real plan that had been used and implemented by someone so we could see live examples of the subjects Claire talked about. Otherwise, this was a really worthwhile session, pitched at the right level with some excellent quick tips and recommendations.

All About Gillian:

I originally come from Edinburgh, but these days live in lovely North Wales, not far from Chester. I am married to Chris, with a son of 4 and 2 step-children of 14 and 18. I spent 12 years working in retail marketing, but left at the start of this year to set up my own marketing consultancy to try and achieve more balance in my life between work and family – the Holy Grail for working mums! Things have started well and the business is growing slowly, which is really encouraging. I’m a social media addict and can lose hours weaving my way between Facebook, Twitter and my new favourite Pinterest. It was my love of social media that led me to blogging. I’m still very much a novice, but it’s something that I enjoy and am looking forward to doing much more of!

Links:
http://www.facebook.com/serenmarketing
http://twitter.com/geenove
http://twitter.com/SerenMarketing
http://pinterest.com/geenove/
https://plus.google.com/106892416753422218887/
http://uk.linkedin.com/in/gilliannove