The Definitive Guide to Creating a Social Media Strategy

Oct. 26, 2010

Yesterday’s post, “Does Your Company have a Social Media Parachute?” highlighted the importance of implementing a social media strategy and gave some statistics on the state of social media strategies in companies today.

After telling you how important they are, we thought it would be remiss of us not to give you some tips on how you can implement an effective social media strategy in your business.

First things first, it’s essential when starting out with any new marketing initiative that you ESTABLISH YOUR GOALS. What do you want social media to do for you? Why are you getting involved? What do you want to accomplish? These are questions that need to be asked if you want to be able to produce measurable ROI for your social media investment in the future.

Examples of objectives may be:

You want to gain a better understanding how you target audience feels about your company.
You want to become more responsive to your customers.
You want to increase your brand awareness through a new medium (assuming your customers’ take part in social media—we’ll discuss that in a moment).
You want to build and develop relationships with your current customers.
You want to generate more quality sales leads.

Understanding your objectives well in advance of getting started with social media helps you to measure successfully from the get-go as well as manage internal expectations for your social media initiatives. This can also help you get a good idea for how your social media strategy and objectives are going to fit in with the rest of your business’ marketing goals.

Once you’ve decided what you want social media to do for your company, it’s important that you DO THE NECESSARY RESEARCH to determine a) if social media is right for your business b) if your customers/ target audience are using social media c) which areas of social media are best for you to take part in.
Not all social media sites are right for every organization. If, for instance, you do some research and realize that your target audience has nothing to do with Twitter (unlikely, but possible) then maybe Facebook or LinkedIn are better options for your company or a combination of both.

Once you’ve established where your audience is, it’s important to figure out how much time you’re going to need to spend on each platform, and listen to the type of content that’s already present on those sites so you have a good idea of how much time and what kind of resources you’re going to need to be successful.

The key to social media that most people who are just getting started don’t understand is that it’s more about LISTENING than talking. Social media is an excellent tool for facilitating conversations but for those discussions to be effective, you need to know what people are interested in (what they’re already talking about).

There are a ton of great social media tools that can help you monitor conversations so you can contribute relevantly. Using these tools before you dive into the social media mix can help you ensure that you’re communicating effectively from the start.

Google Alerts – This is one of the most basic (and easiest) social media monitoring tools to set up and use. By setting up keyword searches for your preferred keywords you can receive updates in your email or RSS feed reader.
Twitter Advanced Search – A pretty simplistic, but also quick and relatively easy search tool to help you monitor conversations that take place on Twitter. Once you’ve set up your search terms you can save your query as an RSS feed so you can continue to be updated on the latest news on your search
Boardtracker – Using this tool is a great way to track information from message boards and forums.
Alltop – Alltop aggregates the top blog posts from the most popular blogs around the world and divides them up by topic categories.
Addict-o-Matic - This platform offers you a single dashboard view of all of the matches for a search across blogs, Twitter, Digg, YouTube and more. It’s an easy way to get all of your social media monitoring done in one place.

While these are by no means all of the monitoring tools out there today, these are some of the ones we find easiest to get up and running.
Okay, so you’ve planned your objectives, you’ve done your research and you’re listening to what’s going on in the social media sphere, the next step is to DETERMINE SOCIAL MEDIA OWNERSHIP and start taking part.

There’s one thing we need to make very clear when you’re establishing this part of your strategy. Social media is not a side project. It’s not a job that can be done by a member of your already over-taxed marketing team in his/her spare time or when he/she feels like it and because of this it’s essential that you set aside the time and resources to take part. Understanding which team or department (social media is much more effective when it’s managed collaboratively) is going to own social media and determining exactly what that role entails is going to make your social media use much easier in the future.

It’s important that you find the right people, the people that are determined to engage in relevant conversations, how are great company representatives and who are interested in building an online community. After you’ve found the right people, you need to plan out how you’d like them to engage with your audience and which platforms/tools they’ll be using. One of our favourite tools to use for collaborative social media updates is Hootsuite. It allows multiple users to access and update Twitter, Facebook, Myspace and LinkedIn accounts from one easy to use dashboard and gives you simple, yet useful statistics for engagement.

Alright, now get those people INVOLVED IN THE CONVERSATION. Here’s where social media gets fun people! Get out there and start commenting on blogs, talking to other folks on Twitter, posting to your Facebook Fanpage or any of the other social media tactics you decided were right for you. Start building those relationships that will form the basis of your social media strategies and will hopefully lead to tangible ROI and increased sales for your business!

And finally, MEASURE YOUR RESULTS AND OPTIMIZE. Since you carefully laid out your social media plans and objectives it shouldn’t be too difficult for you to measure your success. While social media success has historically been a difficult metric for marketers to track, we have some tips that should help you get off on the right foot. Here are some of the key performance indicators (KPIs) we think it’s important to be tracking to help you determine if you’re reaching your goals and some of the questions we ask ourselves to help us determine if our social media strategy is effective.

Quality of customer insights
Number of repeat visitors
Quality of new sales leads
Quantity of new sales leads
Number of comments
Financial - Has revenue or profit increased or costs decreased? Have we improved the promotion responses for our campaigns? Have we reduced spending on other networking areas?
Digital – Has the company enhanced its digital assets? Have we increased our seach engine relevance?
Brand – Is their increased awareness of our brand? Have consumer opinions about our brand improved? Have we improved word of mouth marketing from our following?

What should you do with these metrics and the answers to these questions? You should use them to optimize your strategy and social media usage so that you’re constantly improving and getting closer to reaching your goals. Just like any other marketing initiative, social media needs to constantly be reviewed and revised for ongoing success.

Setting up a social media strategy in your business can be a long and difficult process, but it will always pay off in the end. Being prepared in advance is crucial in a medium like social media because of its ability to allow two-way communication and the spread of information at high speed. It may seem like too much to handle right now, but we promise, if you develop a strong strategy you will have a much more effective social media experience.

Posted by Amberlie Denny at October 26, 2010 8:00 AM