It’s getting late in December as we slide down the fast track to 2015. Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s Day – they all fly by so quickly! Along with everything else you’re doing to wind down 2014, you should take a few minutes to consider your social marketing strategy for 2015. Even if you have a social media plan in place, it’s a good idea to review and tweak it at least once a year. Here are some points to consider when reviewing your social media strategy:

• What are your 2014 analytics telling you? Knowing how many Facebook likes and shares, Twitter retweets and Pinterest pins you garnered this year is nice, but there’s more to the data than these numbers. You should dig deep enough to learn:
  • The type of traffic being referred to your Web site by social media
  • To which pages the social media traffic is referring visitors
  • The conversion rate of referred traffic
  • What your competition is doing.
• Are your social media objectives stated clearly? If your objectives are not clear and measurable, you’re more likely to flounder in meeting your goals. Also, if you’re considering new social media efforts, like Facebook ads or promoted tweets, you need to be clear about why you’re doing it and have specific goals to meet. All social media tactics should have specific goals and different social media channels have different strengths and potential impact.
• Is your social media strategy integrated with your owned, earned and paid channels? Your social media plan should be co-dependent on your owned channels and generating earned media. Are you using social media to support all your channels?
• Have you performed an audit of your social media channels for 2014? Just because everyone else is on Facebook and Twitter doesn’t necessarily mean your organization should be, if the ROI isn’t favorable. If an audit shows that one or more social media channels isn’t bringing in the expected traffic, do you have an alternate strategy to replace it? Maybe you should.
• Are you keeping up with changes/new players in the social media space? New social media channels are popping up on a regular basis. While many of these new channels are “niche” channels that aren’t necessarily pertinent to your organization, you should at least assess the latest channels to see if they might be appropriate for your particular brand and/or target audience.

Whatever your social media strategy, it's important to assess and evaluate your strategy to ensure that all parts are working efficiently and effectively together.  We'd love to hear what you're doing and learn about your results. Let us hear from you. And in case we don't talk with you again before 2015, all of us at Greystone.Net wish you a happy and joyful holiday season. We look forward to what 2015 holds for us all.