Without a social media content strategy, businesses can waste lots of time and money and even hurt their reputation. Untended Facebook pages, nonsensical tweets, questionable YouTube videos, or company lunchroom pins on Pinterest – however cute – won’t stimulate the desired conversations with your target audiences necessary to boost sales and increase demand for your products and services. What’s worse – they might even leave a bad impression.

Step back. Think about your objectives. Listen to online conversations first and visualize the entire social media landscape as an ecosystem. Then, develop your social media PR and marketing plans. Having an integrated strategy is the smart way to build a successful social communications program.

Companies often fail to consider how social media channels work together. A solid plan for effective social media channel integration starts with reviewing each social media channel, studying its unique strengths and weaknesses as it pertains to your brand or product. Only then, can you determine how these separate channels work best in concert. Also, consider how social media integrates with your existing traditional and online marketing campaigns.

For example, when a hotel marketing campaign focuses on compelling content for a website or a frequent traveler loyalty program, social media can actively drive awareness, and prompt engagement to boost these marketing efforts by engaging guests before, during and after their stay. A push to draw guests to a newly opened hotel might begin with Twitter teasers to raise curiosity and provide incentives to check out an informative URL or Facebook fan page and ultimately, the hotel itself. During a guest’s stay, hashtags on coasters in the bar encouraging guests to tweet can increase online engagement. Announcing the hotel’s daily activities/promotions on Facebook can also raise interaction. Post departure, encouraging guests to post photos on Pinterest and Instagram, tweet about their stay or write a review on TripAdvisor can generate excitement, result in further online conversations that go viral, and draw potential new guests to check out the property as well as build loyalty among repeat hotel guests.

Developing a simple interactive campaign where your Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Pinterest profiles point to each other, and back to your website, is a good start.

If you need an agency to manage and tie all this together, please visit us at: http://www.graham-associates.com/social-media-pr-campaigns.html