Finding the right strategy is the key to social media success. It sounds easy enough, but connecting with customers online is hard. The challenges begin with choosing the right platforms, continue with finding customers and prospects on those platforms, and then move into the messaging that motivate community members to act. At any time during the process, the tools you use and the community you've created may go away. Having a plan keeps you focused and moving in the right direction.
Why bother creating and implementing a strategic plan when today's hot platform may be tomorrow's Friendster? It provides a map to your objectives and a history of your activity. While it is impossible to create a long range plan because of the lack of stability in social media, failing to outline a plan of action is short-sighted and risky.
If you don't know where you want to go, how do you know if you've arrived? A strategic plan identifies and prioritizes objectives, assesses the competitive forces, and provides direction and correction. Creating the plan clarifies the thought process, opening the doors to new opportunities. It doesn't have to be volumes of pages to be effective. The best social media strategies outline the steps and benchmarks and are adaptable to the changing environment. Items to include:
Objectives - What are the top five to ten things your company wants to accomplish with social media? Prioritize them so the focus will always be on the most important ones.
Competition - What is your competition doing online? What works well for them? What doesn't? Knowing what the competition is doing lets you learn from their missteps. If your direct competition isn't participating, look for similar businesses for insight.
Platforms - Which platforms make sense for your business? Choose wisely and limit your participation. It's very easy to spread yourself too thin across several platforms and lose all effectiveness.
Customer connections - Where are your customers online and what are they doing? The best communities are filled with customers. Outline ways to connect with customers and encourage them to connect with you.
Tools - What tools are available to increase your reach and reduce your time commitment? Social media is a time hog. Finding and using the right tools is critical to making it an economical marketing channel. Include contingencies for tools disappearing because it happens quite often.
Metrics - How do you measure success? Effective management is dependant on the ability to measure. Much of social media is intangible, but the right benchmarking strategy allows you to measure the unknown.
Action Plan - What do you do first? Next? Having a step-by-step plan in place keeps you on track. Include specific details for the first three months and update it monthly. This keeps you nimble.
Costs - How much does it cost for the tools? Do you need additional team members? Planning for the costs reduces surprises and helps measure the value of the activity.
Timeline - When does everything happen? How often are the metrics reviewed? Create a timeline so everyone knows where they are (or should be) at any given time.
Flexibility - Things change, especially in social media. The ability to adapt to those changes is a requirement for creating an active and loyal community.
People think that social marketing is different from every other business activity because it is new. Advice on how to handle it is readily available and includes everything from "don't worry about the costs, you'll win in the end" to "just get in there and see what works." The primary benefit of having a strategy is the discipline required to creating and implementing it. Social media is a rabbit hole that sucks you in. Before you know it, you have invested hundreds or thousands of man-hours to create an active community of people who will never purchase your products or services. When you are following a plan with regular reviews and measurements of success, you stay on track and don't end up with ugly surprises at the end.