The Social Media Planning Cycle in action in my personal life

So in Week 2 of the Social Media Strategies module the content focuses on the social media strategies. More specifically, the focus is on the Social Media Planning Cycle (Barker et. al, 2013) which is well illustrated in this diagram:

Source: SMS2014 - Week 2 Durham Business School

After reading this module I decided to implement the planning cycle in to my blogging activity on my travel focused blog.

The step by step implementation of the cycle in relation to my blog is presented below.

GOALS

Increase traffic by 20% to the blog - Unique Monthly Visitors - Increase customer acquisition involving tourism boards. Monitor over a period of one month to achieve results. Increase commentary by readers on the posts - achieve at least one comment per post.

STRATEGIES

Redesign the blog look and feel to make it more reading friendly - make it SEO optimised to increase search rankings on Google - develop an overall brand behind the blog.

TARGET AUDIENCE

Female 60% - Male 40%. 80% readership in Canada and USA. Create two personas - one appealing to women and other to male audience.

TOOLS

Based on research, Twitter was found to be most effective tool to reach both men and women personas, but Pinterest was identified to be more focused to reach women persona.

  

IMPLEMENT

Hire an online social media marketing expert - develop the strategies and implementation procedures -  commence execution step by step.

MONITOR

This task was easy since I could track traffic on the blog's built in analytics tool. After implementation I started to see an uptick in traffic, especially the Unique Monthly Visitors to the site. Within three weeks of implementation, I got Las Vegas tourism members as clients.

TUNE

As I write this blog post, I continue to work on implementing the remaining strategies with the web specialist on my other blog and discard any tactics I previously did if it was not getting me the results.

LISTEN

This is something I have been doing through my blog and twitter a lot and definitely find myself fine tuning my writing based on current trends and what the readers ask for.

Overall, my blog readership is up and I have been able to successfully generate new clients that provide me with actual revenue which leaves my blog in the black in terms of net income.