Six Steps to a Social Media Strategy

As promised, here’s information about how I create a social media strategy, step-by-step. Of course, this is only one approach. If you have another approach you use, I’d love to hear about it and learn from you! Or, if you have suggestions for how I can improve my approach, please comment at the bottom of this post.

Slideshare version: http://bit.ly/djD0J8

Two notes. First, with any client, my first step is an assessment of their current situation. Even for those who don’t have a single a social networking account, it’s important to understand what their current presence is, what’s being said about the organization, and so on.  For those who are already engaged to some extent, I create Community Engagement Maps and review the kind of engagement currently going on.

Second, it’s important to remember that your social media strategy is a living document. The communities you are part of and their members are the ultimate “owners” of the strategy and will determine what happens. It’s critical to revisit the strategy regularly, be flexible, and adjust as needed.

1. Start with Goals

My social media strategies always start with business goals. The first thing I do with my clients is define their business goals: what do you hope to achieve by using social media. We define from one to five goals.  Some examples of goals are:

• Drive new registrations
• Get partners to regularly provide end-user technical content
• Get users to provide customer support to one another

It’s important that your social media goals be business goals, action-oriented, succinct, and measurable. For more advice on creating good social media goals, see “Social Media Strategy: Defining Good Goals.”

2. Define Success Criteria

You hear a lot about social media goals, but surprisingly little about success criteria. In my mind, success criteria are the most important part of the social media strategy. As I’ll write about in my series “The Power of Success Criteria,” once you have good success criteria, you can derive your social media strategy, your tools, and your tactics.

Define success criteria for each goal. For the purposes of a social media strategy document, success criteria are “a definition of measurable data and the required values in order for a goal to be considered as met.”  You may have more than one criteria for a given goal.  The goal is considered achieved only when and if the success criteria are met.

Unlike goals, the success criteria can be specific to social media and online. That is, while your goals are generally written so as to be independent of the medium (online and social), your success criteria can account for the medium, since they are measuring specific values.

Let’s say your goal is to Drive new registrations. We know that you are seeking to drive new registrations through your social channels. Therefore, your success criteria can and should reference the social channels. For example:

• Six months post-launch of the social strategy, regstrations have increased by 10% and those new registrations can be traced back to the social channels we are working in.

Include as many criteria as you need to ensure you have demonstrated that the goal was achieved. (see How to Define Succes Criteria for more information.)

3. Create the High-Level Strategy

Once I have clear business goals and have defined success, I establish the high-level strategy. This is probably the hardest part for most people, and why consultants get paid to do this part. To create a strategy, you need to understand the various social channels available, their demographics and “personalities”, and their quirks, strengths, and weaknesses.  That’s why you hear so many social media experts recommend lurking as a first step into social media, so you can learn about each network.

You’ll need to mix that knowledge of the social channels with your understanding of the business goals, your traditional marketing toolkit (SWOT analysis, differentiation strategies, etc.), and throw in some creative thinking. Iterate several times to yield a strategy.

I write my strategy as a bulleted list. Importantly, I define a strategy for each goal. While parts of the strategy will be the same for each goal, parts will be different. So, I look at each busines goal and decide how we are going to achieve it socially.

When defining the strategy, consider how you will achieve the goal, from beginning to end. For example, if this customer doesn’t even have social accounts yet, then the strategy needs to begin with creating accounts and connecting with members. The high-level strategy usually has five to ten bullets. It is quite likely to change repeatedly as we iterate through the strategy development process. Here is an example of a high-level strategy for the goal Drive new event registrations, for a company that registers people for events:

• Gain social followers from existing online customers
• Provide valuable, timely event information through social channels
• Provide financial incentives to social users who register for events
• Provide incentives for existing customers to promote us online/share info about us with friends/followers
• Make it easy for new leads to connect socially
• Participate in communities/subgroups where target customers are  
• Provide social places for existing and potential customers to discuss events/shows after the fact
• Promote awareness among target customers of the event info available through our social channels

4. Create the Tactical Plan

Take the bullet points you’ve listed as the high-level strategy for each goal and combine them. Eliminate duplicates. Next, break the new bulleted list into phases. Logically, some parts of the strategy must be executed before others.

For each phase, create a short-list summarizing the tactical steps for that phase. For example:

 Connect Online

• Build the online assets
• Build the fan/follow base
• Establish social network routines

Now it’s time to go deep. For each of the tactical bullet points, list the tasks necessary to complete it. Your tactical decisions should be informed by your strategy and your success criteria. Your tactical decisions here may also cause you to refine the strategy and success criteria. Remember that the social media strategy is an evolving, living document.

Creating the tactical plan will necessarily require doing additional thinking, research, and planning. For example, at this point you should define the kinds of information you will post and how you will go about finding and connecting with potential followers. You may need to do research on your target customers and where they live online, find information sources or note plans to work out incentive programs with your business partners or with the sales/marketing team in your organization.  Get as specific as you can in the tactical plan. Where you can’t, note the research and decisions that will need to be made. (See How to Define a Tactical Plan for more information.)

5. Set Interim Measures

A social media strategy takes time to execute.  You’ve defined success criteria for goals. That criteria will be evaluated a considerable time after launch. You’ll want to measure your progress toward those goals during the interim, though. Hence, I define interim measures. The purpose of these measures is to:

• Validate the strategy during execution of the plan. If the measures indicate things aren’t progressing as expected, you can make adjustments to the strategy.
• Define more granular success criteria for the tactical steps. For example, say that one of your tactical steps is to get more links to your social sites. Interim measures will help you determine if that’s actually happening.
• Provide stakeholder data. Chances are that your executives (or you, for that matter) will want to know how things are going with this nebulous, mysterious social media venture. Interim measures give you real data that you can present to show progress.
• Clarify the tools needed. Defining the interim measures tells you what you need to measure, which helps define the requirements for tools. You’ll need tools that can measure the variables you’ve chosen.

(See How to Define Interim Measures for more information.)

6. Pick Tools and Processes

You’ll need tools to execute your social media strategy, and processes for conducting it. At this point, you have everything you need to define the requirements for your social media tools. Start by reviewing your success criteria and interim measures. They tell you what you want to measure and in what way. Review your tactical plan, as well, to determine tools requirements. For example, if you are creating multiple Facebook and Twitter accounts and will have multiple people in your organization posting on them, your core tool has to support multiple accounts and teams of users.

The details you included for your interim measures and the tactical plan will help you to clarify processes. As you evaluate and select tools, you will be able to provide more detailed instructions for processes, by referencing the tools you’ll use for each part of the process. For example, link tracking may require using a shortner, a database or spreadsheet, and running reports weekly.

My social media strategies include a breakdown of a daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly tasks. This helps ensure that nothing gets lost and allows the client to do resource planning. There are always tradeoffs. A client may well choose not to gather certain information in order to reduce the amount of time they have to invest weekly.

That’s it. Of course, six steps makes it sound simple–but none of these steps is simple. Creating your strategy requires lots of careful thought and hard work. Depending upon the size of your endeavor and your experience, plan on spending forty to eighty hours on the strategy itself. If you follow this approach, though, and are thorough, you’ll have a detailed blueprint to guide your efforts for many months as you successfully implement your strategy.

What about you? What are the steps you’ve used to create a strategy? Contact me or comment below.