Now that you’ve listened to what your competitors are doing on social media, it’s time to start building your Social Media Strategic Plan.
The first step is to determine your goals. These goals must align with your organization’s purpose and vision. You may thrive to be the most informative organization, keeping your followers always in the loop with the most recent projects, or you may strive to be the most interactive organization, engaging with all the positive and negative feedback provided on your social media platforms. It’s incredibly important to think about exactly what you would like to achieve.
Next, you’ll want to determine which social media channels will work best for your organization. Facebook currently has 2.7 billion users, which is a third of the world’s population (7.8 billion). Although Facebook has a wide reach, it may not help you reach the target audience you are looking for. If you are looking to reach a younger audience, you may be better off getting an Instagram or YouTube channel. According to Business Insider, 65% of members of Gen Z surveyed checked Instagram daily, while 62% checked YouTube daily. Only 34% checked Facebook daily. Determine your audience, get to know them and pick which platform(s) works best for your organization’s audience goals.
Now that you have your social media platforms chosen, you will need to write up a vision statement for each social media site used. Social media expert Olsy Sorokina suggests this formula: “We will use (social media network) for (purpose of this social network) in order to help (business goal)”. It’s imperative that you make a vision statement for each social media platform you will use, as the purpose and goals for each may be completely different.
Alright, now you’ve got your vision statements figured out, now you need to figure out how you will achieve these visions. You should start by writing out SMART objectives. But aren’t all objectives smart? Not that kind of smart, reader. We are talking about goals that are: specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound. An example might be getting 20 retweets per day for a whole week or getting 100 likes on each post on Facebook for a month, or getting five new subscribers on YouTube weekly. There are so many different objectives you can choose from. As long as they follow the SMART criteria, then you’re all good.
So, your ideas are all formed now: you have platforms picked, goals and objectives at the ready- it’s time to give your organization or brand a face. You’ll want the tone and language that you’re using to be consistent across all social media platforms that you chose. You don’t want it to look like three or four different people are speaking on behalf of your organization. It needs to be universal and concise throughout all the platforms. This persona will give your audience a genuine human connection to your brand and help build that loyalty that we’ve talked about!
The visions are there, the smart objectives are determined, so now it’s time to decide how your content will be distributed. A good rule to follow is the rule of thirds. A third of your content can be about your brand or organization. Another third can be video tutorials on how to use your products effectively, and the last third can be based on interacting with your followers. This may seem like a lot when you are dealing with three or four different social media platforms. Thankfully, there are tools to help in these situations. Www.hootsuite.com is a site that helps with management of multiple social media platforms. You can schedule posts to be released at specific times, answer comments on multiple platforms with a click of a button, and track performance and audience growth all from the one site, instead of checking each social media platform separately.
The social media platforms are up and running and now you need to have policies on how these sites will be used. Make policies for what is and isn’t allowed from the community that is posted on your social media sites. You may want to keep things PG or PG13 to encourage a family friendly atmosphere. It is important to have these guidelines readily available and have a way to deal with those not following them. You may also want to implement policies for your employees. These may be policies about not bashing your organization or keeping their personal social media profiles away from the organization. Determine what policies should be in place to best suit your organization.
Lastly, you want to have a crisis plan. Sometimes, unpleasant things happen. These things can be in the form of consumer complaints, major product issues, a company misstep, or catastrophic errors. In any of these cases, you want to know who will deal with the issue and how to stay calm, cool, and collected while dealing with the issue at hand. By having a crisis plan in place, you have a general plan of what to do when things go wrong and are better prepared to handle it to the best of your ability.
You may get through all of the planning and realize that some of your social media tactics aren’t working as well as you hoped they would. Don’t panic, start again from your vision statements, look at what your competitors are doing and re-evaluate your SMART objectives to better suit what is needed to improve your social media goals. Just take it day by day and eventually your social media efforts will pay off.
コメント