A Skeleton Social Media Strategy

Social media can be an invaluable tool for companies to gain new business and to maintain existing clients as well as to search for information and to communicate with other operators. Primarily, its function is to engage in two-way dialogue with customers and other contacts but different social media perform better at different tasks and not all social media are useful for all organisations. For example, Facebook and Twitter, the two main social media channels, are not necessarily that useful for businesses that mainly survive on pass-through trade, such as cafés and local shops. On the other hand, I would recommend Linked In to anyone who has an interest in an industrial or professional career. 

It is also now worth noting that a web page can be very useful for directing different sections of your contact base to the appropriate sections of your social media network, as well as for more traditional purposes, such as marketing, or getting in contact. However, an increasing number of organisations, particularly those on a low budget, find it sufficient to establish a web presence, ie. having a site exclusive to them as part of an existing social media portal, such as a Facebook page or YouTube channel. This can be a very cost-effective strategy for many organisations, especially those with a strong marketing component or niche product and service providers.

The following is a bare-bones, step-by-step guide to establishing a broad-based social media presence, based off the strategy I have evolved for my own use.

·         Create a site on Facebook, Twitter and Linked In as a general minimum. Observe the distinctions between a Facebook group and page but a page is probably better in most cases. I will talk about the background to this elsewhere. Do not use a Facebook profile for your business. Apart from the many other reasons why this is a bad idea, it is specifically against Facebook's own terms and conditions.

·         Consider establishing a business presence on Pinterest, YouTube, Wordpress, Blogspot, Digg, Reddit, EventBrite, Skype etc., depending on the nature of your business and how many hours you have available to invest in a social media strategy. It may be worth establishing your brand on these channels, regardless of whether you intend to use them initially. You may change your mind later and it's a good idea to prevent others from doing so and potentially damaging your brand.

·         Choose a primary social medium and at least partly focus your efforts on directing traffic here. Your website may well be a good choice for this as you have greater content control and can thus target attention more appropriately.

·         Leverage your existing Facebook  contacts, personal or otherwise, to get thirty likes. This will gain you your 'vanity' address and Facebook analytics.

·         In the first instance, curate content. That is to say, find articles that others have posted and link to them with a (short) introduction of your own. I find Linked In groups to be a good source of these. Remember that you are adding value here, so only link to articles that are of genuine interest to your potential clients or that illustrate your own expertise. Build up to producing your own content and blogging. Consistency is a key element to all parts of your social media plan and once you choose a strategy, you must commit to it. Therefore, start off with what you know you can manage. If you feel confident in consistently producing your own content from the start, then feel free to skip this stage.

·         Schedule posts. Most people don't recommend this but, as a sole trader, I find it invaluable. Scheduling my posts allows me to to manage the bulk of my social media strategy on a weekly rather than a daily basis. I schedule posts to Twitter which are then cross-posted to Facebook. This leads us to:

·         Be wary of cross posting. It is also not generally recommended. I recognise that it is fairly bad practice so I would advise using it sparingly (two or three media at most) and formatting your posts so that they look professional on all the sites they appear on. This means short posts for Twitter and no tags appearing on Facebook. Links are good, as they function on Twitter and bring back images for Facebook, but test them before scheduling. If you have one or more staff who have social media as a major part of their job, you can move away from cross posting and build up a separate identity for each medium you are using.

·         If blogging, choose a single blog host carefully and stick with it. Consider how you will integrate this with your website or if the blog itself will be your main site.

·         Build up a database of contacts from business cards and your existing CRM and contact them on social media. Like and follow them on at least one medium, preferably your medium of choice.

·         Find 'like' exchange groups on Linked In and elsewhere. Be generous and honest with your follows.

·         Check, follow, like, join and, very importantly, delete your targets' and contacts' relevant interests on at least a monthly basis. If you don't regularly cull your low value groups and follows you will very quickly find your inbox inundated with more rubbish than you can manage. Your web presence will also be diluted as no-one wants to follow someone whose  second-hand content is indiscriminate nonsense. This strategy is particularly useful for Linked In as the content here will be general business contacts, not just those with an interest in social media. You can also make distinctions on Linked In between your leads, contacts and fellow group members.

As I say, not all of this advice will be useful or relevant for all professionals but it is a plan that I evolved in the course of using social media for my own business and one that I hope other business or non-private sector operators can benefit from.

[Edit 29/03/2013]
You can now download the Skeleton Social Media Strategy article as a printable PDF file.