Social Media Strategy – Ready Set Check-list

No Social Media strategy in place? Press pause on your Social Media launch and read these tips to assess if your company is ready for Social Media…

Setting up Social Media accounts without a clearly defined Social Media Strategy is setting yourself up for failure. It might give you a warm and fuzzy feeling to announce to your CEO that you now have a Social Media presence but if you don’t have the time to devote to putting together a Social Media plan, then you have failed before you have even started. Before you start your Social Media journey, read these tips to see if your company is Social Media ready.

You don’t have the resources

There is a cost associated with Social Media and this is the time that it takes to update your accounts, monitor your Social Media activity, respond accordingly (if applicable) and analyse your Social Media activity. If you plan to enter the Social Media realm, it is important to allocate a person or team to monitor accounts regularly and who can act fast and respond quickly. Too many companies jump on the Social Media bandwagon without putting together a Social Media strategy.

You don’t have a Social Media policy

Not only is it recommended to have a dedicated team member or team to update, monitor and analyse your Social Media accounts, it is also important that you put together a Social Media Policy in your Social Media strategy with guidelines on when you should respond to comments about your brand or company, who should respond, how you should respond and at what point, it should be escalated to someone higher in the company.

You don’t know where your customers are online

Each Social Media platform is targeting a difference audience. Facebook may be better for a consumer targeted product and LinkedIn may be a better fit for a business-to-business product. Before you venture into the online space, it is advisable to do market research and find out exactly where your customers are in the Social Media landscape and how they are engaging with these Social Media accounts so you can focus your efforts and resources solely on those Social Media portals.

You don’t know what you want to get out of Social Media

Before you embark on your Social Media journey, you need to know what your end goals are, set benchmarks and decide how you will measure those goals. These goals may include:

• Increasing quality traffic to your website

• Improving your Search Engine ranking

• Increasing the number of sale leads or your conversion rate

• Building brand awareness and buzz around your company or a particular product

• Monitoring your brand’s reputation online

• Collecting feedback and doing market research on products

Once you have decided what your Social Media goals are, you can develop a Social Media strategy based around these key objectives.

You don’t know who you are as a company

In Social Media, brand identity is very important. The way you approach your Social Media activities will define your brand personality and who you are as a company. The Facebook page for Jim Beam, a leading alcohol brand for example is very relaxed and casual and comments on topics the target audience is interested in such as drinking (of course), sport and music bands. Try and keep your tone and manner consistent in your Social Media strategy and across all your different Social Media platforms.

Contact our Social Media experts to help you decide whether Social Media is right for your business and whether you’re ready to take the plunge. We can help you create a Social Media strategy from researching what Social Media platforms will work for your business, analysing how your target market are using those platforms, helping you to set up Social Media Goals through to devising a Social Media policy and showing you how to analyse your Social Media activity.

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