Marketing efforts that rely on social media alone aren’t likely to succeed on a grand scale. No matter if you’re trying to find candidates or sales leads, in order to make the most of what social media can offer, marketing teams must integrate social media with other marketing initiatives, and tie the elements of each campaign directly to their business objectives. High engagement metrics are meaningless if the efforts that lead to them are not connected to your business objectives. Below are some ways you can integrate social media with your other marketing initiatives, and align your efforts with your business objectives.

1. Social Media Is Not a One-Man Show
Authored by: Michelle Krier – ClearEdge Marketing VP, Marketing & Digital Services.
First seen on SIA blog (10/16/13)
Marketing efforts that rely on social media alone aren’t likely to succeed on a grand
scale. No matter if you’re trying to find candidates or sales leads, in order to make the
most of what social media can offer, marketing teams must integrate social media
with other marketing initiatives, and tie the elements of each campaign directly to
their business objectives. High engagement metrics are meaningless if the efforts that
lead to them are not connected to your business objectives. Below are some ways you
can integrate social media with your other marketing initiatives, and align your efforts
with your business objectives.
What: Amplify your live or virtual event with a Twitter hashtag. A hashtag is a
phrase — often unique — that is preceded by a pound sign (#). Hashtags are
used to locate messages on a specific topic.
How: Create a hashtag for your event, include the hashtag on all printed
materials, signage, promotional email messages, tweets promoting the event
and Google+ and Facebook invitations. Ask attendees to use the hashtag by
including it in your slide decks, and invite them to live-tweet your event.
What: Capture new email subscribers on Twitter by offering exclusive
downloadable content. Twitter has a product called Lead Generation Cards.
Lead Generation Cards allow you to offer exclusive downloadable content to
Twitter users in exchange for the email addresses they have attached to their
Twitter accounts. When they click on your offer tweet to expand it, users will
see a button authorizing you to capture their email address in exchange for the
content.
How: Tweet an offer for a free white paper on the fastest growing fields for
the current year. Collect email addresses for future email marketing
campaigns.
What: Enhance your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts by sharing your
blog posts on Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Facebook and SlideShare (yes,
SlideShare).
How: Social signals are a key component of Google’s ranking, so make sure you
are sharing via social media all the great content you publish on your blog. You
can use hashtags on Twitter, Google+ and Facebook to increase your posts’
visibility, so remember to add hashtags on phrases your audience is likely to
search for. Share your posts via LinkedIn as well. You can promote them via
your status update or share them in pertinent groups. But don’t simply post the
title of the blog post, start by asking a question or citing an important fact
from the blog post as an introduction. And finally, SlideShare is a valuable, but
often overlooked, place to post your blog. It’s not just for PowerPoint
presentations anymore! Forbes calls SlideShare the “quiet giant of content
marketing.” If you haven’t considered SlideShare as a place to promote your
blog, head over there and check it out.

2. Effective social media campaigns are not standalone efforts. They are part of larger
integrated marketing programs. Make sure to keep that in mind as you think about
planning your marketing programs for 2014 and beyond.