How to Develop a Social Media Strategy for Your Organization

24 January 2011

Here is a post I wrote about social media strategies for News Strategies which has also been featured on David Henderson’s blog.

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Setting up social media accounts for your brand is very easy and straight-forward … while expanding and sustaining them in the long-term is another matter.

The people at Digital Brand Expressions claim that nearly 60 percent of businesses today don’t have a strategic media communications plan in place to guide their social media efforts. I cannot stress enough how important it is to set up a strategic communications plan for your brand’s social media outreach and engagement before embarking on this long journey.

In evaluating how best to use social media for your business or organization, it is essential to first evaluate or determine your current media communications strategy across all media platforms whether they be print, broadcast, or online social media. Start off by taking a step back and determine a clear vision of the core purpose of your business or organization. With that in place, you can then develop a credible and authentic voice to communicate this purpose through traditional and online media.

Schedule a quaint day retreat for your team and go back to the drawing board. Familiarize yourself again with who you are, how you are currently perceived by your audience, and how you would like your organization to be perceived and talked about.

Proceed to determine the resources you have at your disposal to develop and maintain a social media presence, but don’t assume that you can hand over responsibility to the intern or a junior level assistant.

Just because they are young and constantly on Facebook and Twitter posting photos of their weekend escapades and tweeting about the great coffee they just had at a trendy new coffee shop, does not make them experts. By all means, they should be involved as they will have much to contribute, but executives and senior staff also need to play an active role, as they are the ones who know their organization/business and industry best.

Once you have revised or established your messaging and allocated the relevant resources, you should develop a set of guidelines for social media. Just as you would create branding guidelines for your business, you should also develop ones for your social media presence. This will help strengthen your brand on these platforms and ensure consistent messaging.

What follows, are the general steps that should be covered when setting up and maintaining a social media presence. I add a caveat that this is not a comprehensive list, but I do believe it covers the fundamentals.

Set up your accounts: If you have not already done this, the logistics of this process are pretty easy, but prior to setting up Facebook pages and Twitter accounts, you will want to search around on all social media platforms to ensure that your chose brand name is available, and if not, you will need to come up with some alternative names. Based on the messaging that you will have already finalized, you will then go about populating the profile of each social media profile accordingly.

Listen to what is being said about your brand: There’s an awful lot of electronic chatter out there so how do you listen? In order to do this properly time needs to be set aside for detailed monitoring.   In social media your core tasks are building lasting relationships with your audience base and creating positive sentiment around your brand. In order to accomplish this you need to seek out opportunities for non-intrusive engagement. There are several ways to do this, but the most important is to set up a listening process and note down any mentions of brand and relevant issues and trends popping up that you feel you can speak to and help with.   Set up Google alerts, #hashtags, etc. Put together a list of keywords relevant to your brand and industry, and just keep an eye out. During this listening process, you will also get a better grasp of the users on these different social networks as the audiences and types of engagement can vary.

Start following the conversation: A bi-product of step 2 is that you will start identifying who the key influencers and active communicators are in your line of work. You will also identify the various stakeholders in your organization may they be clients, customers, members, volunteers, etc. Start following these people along with relevant bloggers, brands, etc, and start engaging in the conversation.

Engage: While there is a need to establish a solid initial audience on Twitter, the thing that will really make a social media presence successful is the ability to listen and take on board what people are saying on the issues that you can speak to in the long-term. Start interacting with the people you are following, offer value to the conversation. Social media is not a one-way conversation where you just tell people what you do and how cool you are. By all means, you should share news of a new product you may have launched or the launch of a new campaign, but also make sure that you ask people’s opinions, provide assistance, call them to action, etc.

Measure: Social Media Optimization (SMO) is rapidly becoming as important as Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as the likes of Google and Bing are starting to reward those brands active in social media with higher rankings. Platforms like Facebook offer metrics for the performance of your page, and there are numerous tools out there to assist you with calculating the performance of your Twitter account such as TwitterAnalyzer and Twitaholic. I wish to stress though at this point that you should not base your analysis on numbers. Don’t make the mistake of just using automated tools to gain you lots of followers and fans. The numbers will look impressive but the real impact and quality will be poor.

Be patient and persevere: Social Media is here to stay. Building a sustainable quality social media strategy requires time and effort. ROI will not come overnight, but as Socialnomics’ famous Social Media Revolution video states, the ROI of social media is that your business will still exist in 5 years.

In summary, take responsible initiative and invest in developing a media and social media communications strategy. Be sure to keep it flexible in this ever changing and expanding online media world, and remember to evaluate it on a regular basis.

With a fresh new year before us, I leave you with a link to Focus.com’s report released late last month outlining Social Media Marketing Trends for 2011. The report identified 10 major trends for us to keep in mind in 2011, which include a stronger focus on global audiences and marketers and brands having to think and act like publishers and broadcasters.