Strategic Decisions – Social Media Marketing

All business growth initiatives require strategic decisions.  You must prioritize and decide which action-items to take, and when.  Whether you plan to innovate and mediate your social media strategy or create a new content marketing plan, making strategic decisions effectively is the key to success.  So to really capture the meaning of strategic decisions and how they relate to your social media marketing efforts, let’s dissect strategic decisions a bit…

We’ll start with the word decision

The word decision is a broad term in the English language.  The spectrum ranges from “scrambled or over-medium” to “determine which conglomerate merger will provide the greatest market-share.”  Many of the synonyms for the word decision have different meanings:

• Agreement
• Arrangement
• Choice
• Judgment
• Verdict

Strategic decisions touch on all of these related words.  So let’s dive in…

Factors which cause poor strategic decisions

There are some factors to consider here…factors which impact how successful your social media marketing strategy will be.  Your goal is to capture the attention of your target audience within the correct social networks using the right approach.  There are three factors you need to realize before making your strategic decisions:

1.  Avoid biased thinking when making strategic decisions

Do your market research.  Define and focus on your target audience.  Then, find your niche.  After performing all of the due-diligence required here, you must trust the data, even if it goes against your thinking…your biases.

Example:  You may love LinkedIn as a professional social media network but you may dislike Twitter thinking it’s less engaging.  But if your target audience can be reached effectively on Twitter, based on research data, not opinion, you must Tweet!

2.  Understand the nature of random events

When you try various approaches to hone your social media skills, you must pay close attention to the metrics derived from analytics.  There are many plugins and apps which provide these analytics.  Also, you’ll watch the numbers from shares and likes, which affect decisions about share-button styles and locations.  These statistics are important, and must be tracked.

Avoid the gambler’s fallacy

Gambler’s fallacy occurs in cases of set probability.  It causes one to believe an outcome may be based on previous outcomes.  The simplest example is a coin-toss.  The probability of getting heads is 50% chance every single time you flip that coin.  The odds of flipping a heads four times in a row is 6.25% chance, before you start flipping the coin.

If you’ve flipped heads four times in a row, you may think to yourself “The most likely outcome of the next flip will be tails, since that is due.”  You have just been deceived by the gambler’s fallacy!  Every time you flip a coin, there is a 50% chance of getting heads, regardless of how many times you previously flipped heads in a row.  Making decisions based on this deception is foolish.

The point here is to not be fooled by the numbers as you analyze the statistics.  Trust your calculated outcomes when making your strategic decisions.

3.  Know where you have the ability to influence an outcome

Social media marketing outcomes can be influenced by you directly if you interact with your target audience socially.  Many automation packages exist that can assist you and save you a great deal of time.  Just don’t remove yourself from the actual social interaction.  Engage and respond consistently.  If you simply automate and leave, you will lose your influence and your success will be unlikely.

If you recall from February, my previous article about decision-making, Decisions – Free Yourself – Avoid Fallacies, shows some real-life examples of how the gamblers fallacy can cause bad decisions.  It also reveals another fallacy which causes poor decisions…the sunk cost fallacy.

Conclusion about strategic decisions as it relates to social media

When developing a plan to utilize the many social media networks out the today, making strategic decisions is very important.  Having a good understanding of the three main factors will help guide your strategic decisions for your social media marketing plan.  Now, start making winning strategic decisions regarding your social media marketing and go socialize effectively!

Thank you for reading:
Strategic Decisions – Social Media Marketing

Written By: Greg Hixon of RE-MEX-IMAGE and Hixonic Web Specialists

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