Creating Social Media Strategy

In this lesson we're talking about creating a social media strategy. This is really the first step in building a social media presence and you want to do it before you start investing in tactics. The way to success is to have a plan.

Kick-Off Questions

Ask yourself a few questions before you get started.

Goals

What are your goals? Are you trying to achieve traffic, looking for brand awareness, searching for links, press or endorsements? Maybe you're trying to get on the radar of investors or potential people who could help you with your company. These are all fine goals. You should check the ones that make sense for you. So if you’re aiming for links, conversions and visits, then you should know not to do things that are more brand awareness or press focused.

Reach

Who do you want to reach? Is it current customers, potential customers, influencers, or perhaps new markets that we haven't touched yet? Which channels are going to work best for us?

Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, and Google+ are some of the mainstream ones, and there might be some niche ones. Don’t forget about the little one’s in your efforts. Also, think of forums as a good social netword. There could be major forums in your industry that are niche, but are hyper-focused and hyper-relevant for what you are doing.

Engagement

What types of engagements will you do? Is it going to be things like content, blog posts, photos, graphics, and videos? Are you going to be promoting other brands or only your own? This is a good decision to make upfront and these should tie back to the goals that you've got.

Metrics

From the goals stem the answers of all the rest of your questions. Once we have the answer to all of these questions and we've checked off the things that matter to us, its time to get a list of tactics that are ordered by importance and organized into a roadmap. That roadmap should have metrics based goals.

Don't set those metrics in stone until you start doing your campaigns and run some tests. Reason being, it's very tough to know the ROI and the acceleration rate of social media. You've got to try some things. Until you have some successes under your belt, establishing metrics like we're going to have 100,000 followers on Twitter in 6 months can be dangerous. That kind of stuff can be very unrealistic if you don't already have experience and you haven't seen your acceleration rate.