Creating a Social Media Strategy with 3 Questions

Utilising social media correctly to express your company’s brand with no guidelines can be difficult. How do you make sure all posts are uniform and convey your ethics to help accelerate the company? The use of a social media strategy can make these tasks easier, whilst making sure that every post, reaction and share is made to work towards a bigger goal. Creating a strategy may seem like a daunting task, however by answering three simple questions your strategy will write itself.

Why?

Put simply, why does your company need social media? What benefits do these online platforms bring to the table?

When pondering these questions for our own strategy, we realised that the scope to share useful and interesting ideas to the individual and the masses was a great opportunity we needed to take advantage of. Having an easy line of communication with fellow industry enthusiasts is a great tool that can help any company grow. When writing the answer to this question try to empathise with your audience and customers. What will they be looking for when visiting each of your platforms? With this in mind we can move on to the next question…

How?

To answer this question you need to assess the success of your current platforms. What style and content has worked for you in the past? Have your followers reacted to certain posts but not to others? Who are you following and who is following you?

Now you can begin pairing solutions to the answers from the first question, why? To do this we created a table separating each platform, and explained how to achieve what we intend our social media to do.

Using Twitter as an example, we realised that the style we needed to adopt had to be short and informal. Moving on to the second and third columns of the table, we chose objectives that could be integrated into the Twitter culture and came up with an idea of how we could achieve each goal. Referencing this table we can move on to the final question.

What?

Specifically what content can be created to achieve the goals on the table?

Now with a rough outline of how to reach your objectives you can set an attainable goal for each point. Once again using our Twitter strategy as an example, we set out four specific targets:

• Create 1 informative article/video per week to generate 15 interactions.
• Share 1 informative article/video per week to generate 10 interactions.
• Spend 10 minutes, twice a week to keep up to date and interact (commenting, liking and retweeting) with at least 3 accounts we follow.
• Make 2 new connections with relevant accounts per week.

Using specific language will make it easier to execute every point, and give yourself a deadline to work towards. You could go further and create a social media calendar specifying which days of the week you will achieve each task as well as planning each post in advance.

Once you start implementing your strategy you can start utilising analytic tools to help evaluate and adjust your plan accordingly. Your strategy and calendar should evolve as your company does, so be sure to set time aside monthly to develop and progress your use of social media.