Put this in your pocket when your organization decides to build or develop its social media strategy.
Bake Bowyer
Media Program Analyst
We get this question a lot – What are social media? The two most comprehensive and appropriate answers are:
- Many things.
- What you want them to be.
For some organizations, social media are customer relationship management tools. For others, they’re marketing vehicles, pet projects, “necessities”, and platforms to serve countless other purposes that can be different between organizations and even departments within organizations.
The one thing definitive about social media is that they can be powerful and valuable. So, no matter where you are in your social media maturity, there is a checklist that should be used to make sure you’re harnessing their value, not letting them run amok.
- Decide what you want to accomplish with your media.
- Decide what each medium can do for you.
THIS IS THE MOST OVERLOOKED PART IN THE PROCESS. Often companies jump to the next step without considering what media can actually do for the organization and how well they can do it. For example, a small business might want to improve something – sales, image, customer complaints, etc. – cheaply and assume that social media, because they can be cheap, are optimal for that goal. However, social media might not be the place to reach a particular audience, communicate a particular message, or a number of other considerations that go unexamined.
- Decide whether traditional, new, or a combination of both would best accomplish your goals.
- Assuming social is a component, are you comfortable being in the social space? Are you ready to correct mistakes, put out fires, and engage in conversations you might not want to have? Will you develop a process to keep your social media under control?
- Are you confident of the capabilities in-house to accomplish those goals with social media?
Again, traditional and new media are as different as they are similar, so aptitudes might not transfer between the two. ALSO OFTEN OVERLOOKED. What is it going to cost to develop those capabilities in-house? Is the potential even available?
- Once you have the capabilities – either inside or outside of your organization – create a timeline on all related activities. How long will it take to plan, develop, execute, and measure your social media efforts? When will you know they’re a success? How much time will you give them to succeed?
Just because activity on social media happens fast doesn’t mean your efforts won’t need time to gain traction.
- Is this social media effort short-term, pulsing, or long-term?
- Will you launch full-scale or do testing?
A primary advantage of social media is that you can quickly and cheaply try different iterations of efforts to fine-tune what works best.
That’s a little more half of the checklist. Come back tomorrow for Part 2 and concluding thoughts on how you can effectively fit social media into your organization.
Tags: How to use social media, social media execution, Social media plan, Social media strategy
