Five rules for a social media strategy
By Simon Newsam
If you were planning on travelling somewhere by rail would you get onto a train without first checking to see where it was going?
Of course not, but it’s what most people have done with social media – jump on board without knowing where it will take them.
For individuals it’s not necessarily a bad approach to understand social media – just try it out and if it doesn’t work for you then jump off again, nothing ventured, nothing gained.
But it’s not always such a good idea for a business. Your failed foray into social media may have damaged your reputation, wasted valuable time (and even money) going nowhere and led to missed opportunities that you were either unaware of or unable to exploit.
The bottom line is that every business needs a social media strategy – no matter how big or how small a part it plays (people are talking about your business on social media platforms whether you’re joining in the conversation or not so, at the very least, you ought to know what they are saying). And to form that strategy you need to know what your goals are and how to achieve them.
Several clients and non-clients of Effective Communication have asked about this so I’m putting together a series of simple guides to get them on the right track, starting with this introduction and suggesting these five simple rules on which to build your business’s social media strategy:
• Your social media strategy needs to be integrated with other marketing and PR activity.
• Identify your goals. Keep them simple, attainable and don’t plan too far ahead at first.
• Plan your route to achieving those goals and stick to the plan – don’t get distracted by “new opportunities” and deviate from it – those who do usually end up chasing their tails and not reaching their goals.
• You must balance budget and resources with benefits, so review and modify your plan and goals if needs be.
• Monitor and evaluate what social media platforms deliver and feed this information back continuously into the development of your strategy.
I’ll put some meat onto the bones of each of these in the days and weeks ahead – I hope this helps some of businesses focus on what they need to do in the meantime.
Tags: business, Effective Communication, integrated marketing strategy, reputation, social media, social media goals, social media monitoring, social media plan, social media strategy for business, social media strategy for SMEs
