Developing Social Media Strategies

Lauren Owens - May 21, 2013

Social media is one of the very best ways to find and engage with customers online, but how you go about participating in social media will determine your success. In this post, we’ll take a high-level view of social media strategy and how you can develop one to best serve your audience, and your purpose.

Finding Your Audience

Pinterest, Tumblr, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube… it’s enough to make your head spin. Busy companies have enough on their hands before they consider a single social network, much less seven. Luckily, this is the first tenant of social media strategy – you don’t have to be everywhere. You do have to be where your audience is.

So, before you go any further, you have to take a step back and consider who your audience is and where they might live online.

If you are largely B-to-B, consider a handful of social channels including LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube and SlideShare.

If you are B-to-C you’ve got some additional thinking to do. If, for example, your audience skews younger, YouTube, Tumblr and Instagram should be high on your list. If you’re targeting moms, Facebook and Pinterest are your new best friends.

You see how this works?

Feeling Your Way Around

Once you’ve figured where you should concentrate your energies, it’s time to focus on how.

Before you create your page, it’s important to study the social customs particular to the network. Specifically, what can you do there, and what should you do there?

Sure, you can use Pinterest to post a bunch of product photos with links back to your site, but should you? Probably not. Instead, take a look how successful companies use the channel. Look at case studies and evaluate the social tendencies of the companies that you admire.

Pinterest has a few great case studies on their tools for business page. Take a look, for example, how Petplan Insurance – a company without product photos – perfectly engaged their audience while characterizing their brand.

Going “All In”

Now it’s time for the real social media strategy – precisely how will you characterize your brand? Start to brainstorm categories for the types of content you will offer your users. Will you post inspirational quotes? Links to helpful content? Instructional videos? Infographics?

Once you’ve got your list of categories, begin to plan your social media content by creating a calendar in an Excel spreadsheet. Include the date of publication, the textual post, and the image or files needed. You can use a free tool like Hootsuite to schedule your posts. That way, you can have your foundational social content covered for a month or two at a time.

The rest of your content will come from daily interactions with users. This should include liking or sharing the content of the users you follow, and responding to your users’ questions or concerns.

Rising to the Occasion

Participation in social media is, ultimately, a customer service opportunity. Once they’re on social media, companies have a responsibility to effectively respond to their customers’ questions and concerns. Doing so publically, and with limited character count, can be tricky.

In general, it’s a good idea to have a plan in place for customer feedback – both positive and negative. To ensure that you’re providing good customer service, make sure you have a dedicated person (or people) in charge of monitoring your social media feeds for activity. This way, when someone interacts with your brand, you can respond swiftly and appropriately.