By Dean Ara

Over the past 25 years, there’s been a sweeping evolution in the social media domain and much change in how people and brands engage socially online. While it is true the first use of social media emerged in the late 1970s, it wasn’t until about 2006 that we saw social media come into the mainstream with the growing popularity of Facebook and launch of Twitter.

With the breakthrough of social communication, social media marketing has created a new world of opportunities for you, as MSP sales and marketing folks, to connect with your target audience – but only if you can master the social media value chain. In this post, you’ll learn to break down the social media value chain, and how to implement a seven-step social media strategy so you can unlock the power of social. Discover how the right approach to social media marketing can help you generate top of funnel leads and nudge them down the funnel.

If sales today is all about education, then MSPs need to invest in social channels because that’s where people discover, share, respond to, and engage with your content. People already use social media for news, information, how to’s, and conversations. Whether your sales education strategy includes content marketing or direct one-to-one sales prospecting, social can help.

At a high-level, social offers three key benefits for MSP sales and marketing professionals:

The Social Media Value Chain for MSPs

How do you harness the value social can bring your organization? By understanding the social media value chain and using it to your advantage! Below we have outlined the four components of the social media value chain.

7 Step Strategy to Master the Social Media Value Chain

It’s important to have a strategy and plan in place before you move your MSP business into the social domain. This seven-step strategy will help you master the social media value chain.

            1. Learn about your ideal audience

The more you know about your target audience – what they want and what conversations they’re engaged in – the more successful you’ll be. What are your audience’s demographics and interests? What sites do they frequent? What social channels do they use and what captures their attention there? And as you build your social following, you’ll  gain many of these insights.

2. Define your goals

Set SMART social goals – goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. Make sure your social goals are quantifiable, tied to a specific campaign, and aligned with your overall business objectives. Try to identify goals for which you can attach a number such as:

3. Pick your platform(s)

To decide which social platforms to use and how best to use them, take note of the following:

There  are a number of other popular platforms such as YouTube, Pinterest , Google+ and many, many more – but if your time is limited, then you need to choose which platform to use. Don’t try to be on all of them; be selective and strategic to get the most out of your social media marketing.

4. Create social accounts and profiles

After you’ve prioritized and selected the platforms you want, you need to create an account for each one. Be sure to optimize your profiles and use high-quality images.

5.Determine key messages and create a calendar

Make sure you nail down what brand messages you want to use on which channels to resonate with your audience. For example, you might use Facebook for feel-good content about your company and your employees, Twitter for quick facts and statistics about MSP and hosting trends with links to your content, and LinkedIn for sales outreach. You’ll want to schedule different posts on different platforms – do NOT post the same thing on each platform. Differentiate your messaging and then create a social media calendar to keep your content fresh, interesting, and purposeful.

6.Engage!

Take time to build your social followers. Follow your customers and partners, retweet interesting and relevant content, respond to feedback, and be active where you want people to engage with you. A few tips can help you increase your social networking visibility:

7.Observe and measure

Pay attention to your followers and reevaluate your messages and strategy with each campaign to get the most out of the social media value chain. Listen to the current conversations, find the top influencers in your industry, and learn what relevant hashtags are trending.

Some key metrics to measure:

With the right tools, you can get even more advanced analytics and measure:

Wondering What to Post About?

If you’re not sure what to post on your social media channels, here’s a list to get your creative juices flowing:

Calculate the ROI on Social Media

Social should not be executed in blind faith – like any spend, you need to be able to prove the ROI. As an MSP your budget and resources are limited and therefore your time investment in social media needs to generate measurable results. However, there is no blanket approach to defining the value of social for your business. Rather, its ROI can be measured by its effectiveness in meeting the goals your organization has set.

If your goal is to generate leads or sales through social then you need to track your social media efforts. Tracking your efforts against your goals lets you evaluate which platforms and specific posts are most effective at reaching your overall goals. Tracking allows you to measure where your social leads are coming from and what value they are providing your business. If you notice some channels are more successful than others, then you may want to spend more on those and cut back on others that aren’t performing as well.

You can use a number of tools to track your social media efforts such as Google’s URL Builder, Hootsuite, or Customer LTV Calculator.

Social Success and Beyond

At the end of the day – social media requires you to be, well, social. Many companies make the mistake of over automating their social accounts and forgetting everything they know about how to build relationships. Remember that you are connecting with people and – online or offline – people still crave authentic experiences. Your use of social media will be more rewarding when you understand and leverage the social media value chain.

Want to bring your social media game to the next level? At Total Product Marketing, we specialize in marketing for Channel Partners and Cloud Service Providers. Contact us today for help in developing a social media marketing strategy to help achieve your business goals.