A Basic Outline For Creating A Social Media Strategy

R2iNTEGRATED released a social media survey recently that does in fact show an increased level of participation by many companies in social media but yet only half of them are entering with a strategy in place. So why aren’t these companies drafting social media strategies? Is it because social media is a relatively new field and companies are unsure of what to include in a social media strategy? Is the perceived complexity of creating a social media strategy preventing many from creating their company’s plan?

A social media strategy need only be as complex as required to help your company see a positive return in it’s social media investment at minimum I feel your strategy should include the following elements:

Determine The Why – Why does your brand want to use social media as a marketing tool? If your answer is “because everyone else is” be prepared for failure. Instead the Why should be for reasons such as:

• Creating brand awareness
• Delivering more sales
• Creating a positive customer service experience
• Building anticipation for a new product launch
• Driving more traffic to your site
• Creating brand loyalists to spread your message

Determining the reason Why your brand is using social media is a fundamental step as it will form the basis for creating your Goals, Objectives and Strategies.

Goals, Objectives And Supporting Strategies – In order to track anything in life you first need something identifiable to measure against and creating your goals, objectives and supporting strategies can help you to achieve this.

Your goal is the broadest possible definition of what your overall strategy should accomplish and should only include one item for completion (more site traffic and not more site traffic plus an increased newsletter subscription), the objective narrows the focus of the goal and specifically lays out what is to be accomplished and when (each goal can have multiple objectives) and finally your supporting strategies are the specific methods you will use to complete your objectives and thus achieve your goal (for each objective you can have multiple supporting strategies).

Your goals, objectives and strategies should support the reason Why you want to enter into social media as previously determined. For example if you wanted to create further brand awareness you may look at the doing the following:

• Increase the number of subscribers to our newsletter (Goal)
  • Increase our newsletter subscription from XX to XXX by Day, Month, Year (Objective)
    • Move our subscribe to our newsletter button above the fold on our website (Strategy)

Jason Falls and his talk at Social Media Summit 2010 has greatly influenced my thinking on Goals and Objectives.

Social Network Research – Simply throwing everything at the wall and hoping something sticks is not a good strategy and is bound to fail eventually all while creating burnout for the individual in charge of managing all those social network profiles. Instead a tactical approach should be taken to find which social networks your current clients are using and then you can focus your efforts on those networks before expanding. Jay Baer of Convince and Convert wrote the excellent article 4 Detective Tricks To Find Your Customers In Social Media that deals with this issue in great detail.

Create Your Profiles – Now that you have determined where your existing clients are it’s time to create your profiles on these social networks. Try and maintain a consistent look across all the different networks by using your official logo, slogan and even the colour scheme of your website to help your fans quickly identify your social media presence as official.

Create A Schedule – With your social networks identified and profiles created it’s now time to begin using the social networks effectively to achieve your stated goals and objectives and in order to be successful you will have to post regularly to your social media channels and you can accomplish this by creating a posting frequency schedule.
The schedule you create for yourself can be as simple or as complex as you make it; it can be created on a spreadsheet or entered into your calendar of choice or added to your to-do list. Your schedule should include basic information such as which days you’ll post to which social network and what type of content to be posted. Your schedule can also help you to determine content that can be repurposed for distribution to different networks, for example you may shoot a video for YouTube on Monday which would allow you to repurpose the video into a blog post on Tuesday.

Determine Measurements – The only way to know if your efforts in social media have been successful is by measuring whatever metrics you can and since I don’t believe there is a holy grail as of yet when it comes to measuring social media ROI what I currently do is create a simple spreadsheet and then manually track the metrics determined to be important as outlined by the goals, objectives and supporting strategies.
If one of your goals was to increase website traffic you could do this by looking at the data gathered by your analytics program of choice and by looking at your overall traffic from day to day, week to week or month to month and recording the visitors, you would then look at your referring traffic sources to see which social networks sent you traffic over the same amount of time. If traffic levels have increased and your main increase in traffic is seen coming from your social networks that would be a positive ROI as determined by your goals, if your traffic has increased but not because of social networks that would be a negative ROI and you would have to determine why traffic hasn’t increased from your social media efforts.

Does your company have a social media strategy in place? What elements do you typically include in your strategy? Leave a comment below with your thoughts about creating a social media strategy and what methods you use to create one.

Flickr Photo “Strategy” By Waponi