The very word ‘strategy’ can make many people shudder. But it needn’t be that way. After all, strategy is just a series of answers to some specific questions. The trick is to understand what the right questions to ask are in the first place… Hopefully this post will help you find some of those questions and help you come up with some of your own…
Without a clear road map, it can be easy to get caught up with using Social Media tools like Twitter, Facebook, and blogs to promote your brand but without knowing the who, what and why you are doing so in the first place.
By the end of this post you’ll:
- Set Goals (Objectives
- Identify who is your target audience and what are their needs?
- Integrate Social Media tools
- Address culture change
- Understand what resources you’ll need
- Know what tactics and tools best support your objectives
- Review measurement
Objective
Your purpose here is to engage in conversation with your target audience. The social media part of it is just a set of tools that will get you to where you want. Define your end goal by answering the following:
- What do you want to communicate to your target audience?
- What do you want to accomplish using social media?
- Then re-word your objective so it is “SMART” – Specific, Measurable,
- Achievable, Realistic, and Time-based
2. Who is your target audience and what are their needs?
Whether you’re aiming at B2b or B2C, the success of your Social Media efforts largely falls on identifying who your audience is so that you can establish who would be interested in and benefit from your message.
If you are selling a product,who will it mostly appeal to. (The more specific you are the better, so list by age group, gender, interests, affiliations or any other defined categories).
Keep in mind that this is an adaptive process. As you use Social Media, you’ll find that your target audience may be different than what you had originally thought.
You’ll get feedback from your audience and your goal should be to listen and adapt based on that feedback. However, you need an initial starting point, so:
- Who do you want to reach with your social media efforts to meet your
- objective?
- What does your target audience know or believe about you, your business or your products/services?
- What key points do you want to discuss with your audience?
- What Social Media tools is your audience currently using?
- Is there any additional research that needs to be started so that you can learn and understand about your audience’s online social behaviour?
Integration
Write down how you will use each Social Media tool then create process that will help link all your Social Media efforts together – for maximum visibility. For instance, you may want to blog about the daily challenges and successes relating to running your business; you might use twitter to’ tweet’ out product updates – engaging your customers in conversation about the product. You could use Facebook for special promotions and as a way to provide freebies. To link them all together, you would make your tweets visible on your blog, provide a link to your blog on your twitter profile and provide links to your Facebook promotions in your tweets. But remember. if there are different people using different Social Media tools in your company, make sure they adopt the same view with regards to integration. So, identify:
- If it exists, how will your social media strategy support and enhance your existing Internet strategy?
- How will your Social Media strategy support Email, Website, Search Engine advertising (e.g. pay per click – PPC), Other?
Culture Change
One of the biggest challenges faced by businesses is trying to introduce social media into the ‘communication mix’ – this may mean changing some of the ingrained culture practices. Changing a business culture is not an easy task and can be a long and challenging process, involving a series of complex interrelated steps in order for individuals to embrace change rather and not offer resistance.
- How will you get your company to embrace your Social Media strategy?
- Are there any colleagues you think of that will help to drive it forward?
- How will you address any fears or concerns?
- What is the rate of change your company can tolerate?
Resources
One question that keeps cropping up is, ‘what if we don’t have the resources to implement and manage Social Media?’ This is a great question, and tough to answer. But remember this, the online conversation will take place with or without you, so maybe the right question should be ‘what will be the effect on you or your company if you don’t assign the resources to implement and manage your Social Media?’ It will take time to successfully implement, but you may fins that people in your organisation are already using Social Media and may want to take on the additional role or it may mean employing an outside consultant to help you with this. So start with, answer these questions:
- Who will implement your company’s Social Media strategy?
- Can you allocate a minimum of five hours per week to your strategy?
- Do you need any outside expertise to help implement your strategy?
- Will your content updates depend on any other resource or person?
Tools and Tactics
All too often businesses and individuals get caught up in who is following them and how many friends or followers they can get. They study all the tools to get more connections. They get entwined in the competition for who has the most friends or followers and lose sight of the true goal which is helping their audience.
Use tools that help you schedule and save you time. Use tools that help you locate people within your target audience.
- What tactics and tools best support your objectives and match your targeted audience?
- What tactics and tools do you have the capacity to implement?
Measurement
Use a combination of metrics to measure the success of your social media strategy. A couple of examples of metrics are quality and number of twitter followers, user engagement on different platforms, comments, and spread of information amongst others. You may want to use different metrics based on your specific strategy. Constantly evaluate your metrics and tweak your strategy based on your metrics.
If you’re just starting out, you may want to test out various social media strategies with a small audience before expanding to a larger one.
Depending on what your objectives are, you’ll need to understand:
- What hard metrics will you use to track your objectives? (Google Analytics Omniture etc – always use more than one analytics tool)
- How often will you track?
- Do you have the systems and tools set up to track efficiently?
- Before you start this remember you should take a snap-shot of where you are before you implemented Social Media then again during and after.
- What data quality will you take into consideration to generate insights or help you improve your social media strategy?
And finally…
Based on active conversation with your customers, your Social Media strategy needs to constantly evolve. It gives you the privilege of direct customer feedback and two-way conversations. Use the different social media tools to talk with (not at) your target audience, listen to how they are using your product or service and what they like or hate about it, and to provide information on the unique value you are providing to them.
As always, if you have questions, comments or want to add to the above please do – after all, this is a conversation too 
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