Social Media: 13 Tactics to Make It Work Harder

Heidi Cohen had a great column on 1/25/2010 in ClickZ on “13 Tactics to Make Social Media Work Harder” that really sums up some of the best advice that many of us see as the most successful elements of social media strategies when we have the benefit of 20/20 hindsight.  Think of how powerful these ideas will be if you put them in place before you put the social media strategy to work!  This is a high level summary of Heidi’s article.  Read the full version here.

Here are 13 actionable tactics:

1. Understand how and why members of your target market use social media.
2. Develop content that meets consumers’ needs and interests. This should go beyond just broadcasting some offer.
3. Use a variety of forms of content and understand the role that each plays in social media. A combination of time specific and evergreen information is necessary.
4. Enable social media participants to share content. This applies to the content on your Web site and third-party social media sites.
5. Support and promote consumer-generated content.
6. Integrate product information into your content/story.
7. Leverage social media’s ability to serve as a search function. In part, Twitter’s time on site is low relative to sites l
8. Use content in social media to help build organic search optimization.
9. Listen to, interact with, and recognize consumers. They want to be heard and acknowledged. They want human interaction, not an automated communication.
10. Provide immediacy and nimbly react to events as they unfold.
11. Participate in social media with a human voice and a personal story. This refers back to “The Cluetrain Manifesto.”
12. Encourage employees to participate in social media. Trust them to build relationships outside of the traditional channels of sales, support, and service.
13. Track relevant conversations, responses, customer relationships.