Why Invest in Social Media? Ask One Question

I’ve had the awesome opportunity to work on social media training with many individual farmers and ranchers as well as guest speaking at several events during the past several years. One of the most frequent challenges folks often face when trying to justify the investment into social media can be boiled down to just one question… “WHY?”

I always suggest planning out a social media strategy should begin with sitting down to draw out a road map. Who is your audience? What are you trying to accomplish? What are your goals? But this week, I found a good article in my feeds that summed it up pretty well.

Win With Social Media Marketing By Answering One Question | WebPro Business

The thing that really needs to be nailed down when it comes to blogging or any other social media effort, is the answer to this most important question:

Why?

Before you dismiss this as obvious, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen a group of smart, accomplished marketers just assume the person in charge of the directive has a well informed answer to “why”.

If you’re a social media marketer, content marketer, copywriter or in another role where blogging is part of your responsibility, try to start asking “why” when you receive directives related to growing community, affecting a certain kind of traffic or other key performance indicator.

If you get a reasonable answer, then you’ll have better context to achieve the goal. If you don’t, then it’s an opportunity to collect the information necessary to make your efforts more productive for you, the company and the audience you’re targeting.

There are several ways to approach this, but one of the most straightforward schemes for asking and managing the “why” is through a cycle of hypothesis, implementation and optimization.

Visit the article to read more – Win With Social Media Marketing By Answering One Question

###

The author gets a little technical, but I think he makes some great points, but it certainly helps my strategy on a daily basis as I work with ranchers here in Montana. I continually find myself asking how we can make the best use of social media to market folks who don’t always understand the value of it.

Too often we can get wrapped up in what WE love to do and misplace our focus on our objective for investing time online. Sometimes it’s good to be reminded of how some many issues can be refocused with a question as simple as “Why?”.