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A social media strategy is critical in ensuring your organisation has direction and a plan that allows you to maintain momentum when entering the social media world. It is the backbone to ensuring the continuous improvement cycle of your organisation’s social management system is maintained. An initial social media strategy needs to be created as part of the planning stage of your organisation’s social media management system and constantly updated after monitoring and reviewing what is and isn’t working for your organisation. By creating a social media strategy it allows you to identify:

• which “space/s” your organisation should enter into (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Blog, etc)

• why your organisation needs to be in each “space”

• what your organisation is hoping to achieve

• who you want to engage with and attract

• what products and/or services your organisation wants to advertise (Content Strategy)

• how success will be measured.

83% of all companies use Facebook. With the social media revolution, companies are no longer given the choice on whether they do social media, the question now is how well they do it. However, many companies are getting distracted by the tools and aren’t creating a strategy. Social media are tools that facilitate online social interaction. Like any tools, they must be used efficiently to maximise return on investment (ROI).

Companies are often diving in head first without understanding what they are doing. Many organisation’s sole driving force to engage with social media is simply because they are saying “my competitors are on Facebook, I need to be there” without knowing:

• why they need to be there

• what they are hoping to achieve

• who they want to attract.

This results in the organisation getting to the stage where a few months on they say “I have a Facebook and Twitter account, what do I need to do now?”

This is why a social media strategy is so important. It will keep the momentum going and ensure the organisation constantly knows the “why, what and who” relating to their social media marketing. Without the strategy that includes the key elements (what content, which platforms, what audiences are being targeted), companies often waste time in the environment. Organisations need to have that research done first before wasting time in a space.

Your organisation’s social media strategy must be aligned to the business objectives. This is important to ensure your organisation knows what you’re trying to achieve in each space. If the social strategy is not aligned to the business objectives, then you don’t really know what you’re measuring.

When your social strategy is aligned to the business objectives, then you know what your benchmark is before you start and then can be measured periodically after the implementation of social media. This makes it easier to measure your return on investment, measure your success from month to month and identify trends to pinpoint what is and is not working.

Content Strategy

Having a content strategy is critical. Both a social media strategy and content strategy give direction to your social media objective. It also keeps the momentum going in terms of constantly being aware of:

• what is your organisation promoting

• who are you connecting with

• what are your products and services?

Without a content strategy your advertising may prove to have a negative effect. An example of this is that Twitter itself will punish you for publishing the same links over and over again. You will be classified as a “spammer”. Your followers are not interested in constantly being exposed to “spam”. Make sure that the content strategy is in place so that you’re talking about a variety of things and posting links to different and often third party sites.

It’s about building a community and actually looking at subject matters or areas of interest that people can engage with. The subtle branding is the fact that your organisation is the “content curator” on Twitter as a channel.

The most important and effective way to establish which “space/s” or social media channel/s your organisation should engage in, is to go through a listening exercise. This will allow you to:

• establish what the industry conversation is

• look at your competitors in the space

• look at where people are talking.

By conducting the “listening exercise”, you can define where your money is best spent in terms of those channels. That’s not to say you shouldn’t explore all the opportunities available, however most organisations have a limited budget available.

Do a gap analysis on your competitors. You don’t want to go into a crowded space. Even if people are within that environment, it might be particularly popular but if your key three competitors are already there, maybe you need to look at a separate environment or create an environment that actually going to have a compelling reason for consumers to come and visit.

How do you stand out, particularly if your competitors are in a crowded space? A blog is your pivotal point. That’s where you can originate your message from and have the other social media emanate from there. Directing traffic back to your website and blog allows you to define your style. For example, do you want to make your “space” intellectually stimulating, controversial, or objective? You can then post on Facebook and Twitter but keep the people coming back to your own “space”.

Both your social media and content strategies are all about defining the key criteria and then ticking them off once they have been achieved.

Social media engages the community at a whole new level. Do you want immediate, effective and honest communication between your brand and your customers?

Whether you are a consumer brand, personal brand, small business or not-for-profit organisation, Social Media Management (SMM)delivers unique digital media campaigns and the right social media consulting along with an effective social media strategy.