The Social Media Marketing Book

Campaigns Versus Ongoing Strategy

The actual work of social media marketing can be divided into two types: ongoing strategy and campaigns. Your ongoing strategy is the stuff you're doing on a regular basis: blogging, tweeting, contributing to forums, and so on. This is what you should be doing before your monitoring strategy finds an erupting crisis. Your ongoing work builds your brand and reputation.

When you've built a foundation of social media engagement with an established blog, Twitter account, and reputation on various social networks and sites, you can start launching campaigns. These should fit within your ongoing strategy and have specific goals and finite timelines. Viral videos, contests, and product launches should all be supported with dedicated campaigns. Seasonal and timely events are great things on which to base campaigns (see Figure 10-8).

Campaigns are the kinds of social media efforts that result in large but temporary spikes in traffic. I'll detail how to encourage those new users to become repeat visitors a little later in this chapter.

Figure 10-9. Your social media efforts should be integrated, and your blog should be the hub.