Social media is a hot topic amongst the outdoors blogosphere. Are you or your business investing time in social media?

Today was my first post over at www.huntingnet.com.  No worries, I will still be maintaining and contributing to FieldJournals.com on a full-time basis.  My first article discussed the impact of social media and the hunting industry.  Other than my family, hunting and social media are my passion.

You may see me guest post on other hunting sites around the web; you may also see other bloggers posting on FieldJournals.  I am a strong advocate for knowledge sharing.  We should all be sharing our passions with other outdoors folks to continue this great sport.  Tip and tricks, breaking news, articles, blogs, etc., should all be shared across the web.  That is ultimately the beauty of the internet and social media — sharing.

If you own your own hunting website, service, store, outfitting service, or anything related to hunting and business, you need to check out this powerful video.  If you are not involved in social media today, I recommend you become involved before your competition puts you out of business.  We can help you leverage social media and take your business to the next level.

With the explosion of social media over the past year, I decided to create a series of posts dedicated to social media consulting.  The series will give hunting businesses a clear strategy on how to incorporate social media into their marketing plan.  The purpose will be to drive additional traffic to your company’s website, increase brand awareness, and increase revenue growth.  Each item listed below will receive an in depth post on how to implement. If you want to run a successful social media campaign, follow the tasks below:

1. Complete an audit on all the social media profiles you have today.
2. Perform stakeholder interviews around your company to ask about current social media profiles and what future programs they would like to see.
3. Perform a competitive analysis on what social media programs your competitors are running.
4. Perform user interviews of people who currently use your website as well as potential people that are interested in your service.
5. Create a questionnaire that can be emailed out to people asking what they would like to see out of your product/service in social media.
6. Begin to layout a strategy road map on what social media services to participate in.  Begin laying out your plan of attack with dates.
7. Implementation. Begin to sign up for services and create your social media profiles.  Be sure to include your branding.
8. Track your progress of the new campaign utilizing various analytics tools.
9. Stay active in each of your profiles.  Do not let your profile go out-dated. Continue to refresh your profiles.

I think if you carefully follow each of these steps, from the gathering of user requirements through profile maintenance, you will be far ahead of all hunting and outdoor companies and websites. If you have any questions with anything related to social media or need assistance implementing this plan, feel free to send me an email (info@fieldjournals.com) and I’ll be more than happy to help.