People constantly use social media to talk and share with their connected relationships. It’s unlikely they will spend this time sharing about brands they love. Your business needs to get their attention, gain their trust and hope they love you enough to share your information with the other things they want to talk about.
Having a labeled agenda about what you intend people to do with your media can help organize what to write, publish and promote. Here are 3 sample Intended Actions that could work alone sometimes but they should be connected or overlap. When you apply Intended Actions to Business Objectives, an agenda will develop for each story with purpose and value.
Intended Action: What exactly do you want them to do?
- Read/Share – In the process of Word-Of-Mouth-Marketing.
- Test/Buy – In the process of touching samples and ownership.
- Activity/Comments – In the process of contribution and membership.
Apply to Business Objective: What should be the business result?
- Grow Influence – Read/Share builds the incoming links that Google will use to grade your site for search results.
- Increase Sales – Test/Buy will lead to testimonials and repeat sales.
- Build Community – Activity/Comments becomes brand loyalty.
Map Your Strategy: How will a story be written to include a clear agenda?
Grid Action Topics – Write Intended Actions across the top and make a list of story subjects down the side column. Match each story subject to the best Intended Action choice(s). Write the story using words that lead or imply the Action Topic.
Create Publishing Schedule – Use an editorial calendar to develop your Action Topic stories to be completed before deadline. Invent smart headlines for each story, write unique bulletins to be used for each social media channel and get feedback from networked influencers before publishing.
Test and Adapt – Play with the analytics and try new things. Publish each story with easy share buttons, link to a landing page offer, start the conversation with a comment as footnote. If you’re not happy with the long term results find someone new to help Map Your Strategy.
