Nail Down Your Social Media Plan in Writing

This is the fourth step in a series about creating a social media program for your business. If you’d like to read the previous steps, they can be found here.

Walking into a ballgame, you are likely to hear someone shouting, “Program!  Get your program! Can’t tell the players without a program!” 

I can’t think of a better analogy for developing a “best practices” social media program: its all about nailing down - in writing - who you need to connect with online, what you are trying to achieve with them, and knowing what to measure so that you will know if you have achieved your goals. 

Knowing what to measure - and indeed what social media channels and tools to apply - begins with your business objectives and your audience.

Step 4: Take Your Business Objectives and a Definition of Your Audience and Add Your Social Media Touch-points, Feedback Cycle and Tie the Initial Program to the Goals.

In setting up your plan and framing it, you will reach back to the earlier steps and think through the approach that you want to take in developing a program.  Start with what you already know about your business and slide into social media.  The points for your program:

• Review your corporate and product positioning.
• Use your positioning to define relevant keywords and phrases.
• Track social media content relevant to your market.
• Use your keywords and phrases to identify social media influencers who are driving conversations about the market, your company and products, and your competition.
• Read the social media content of top influencers in your market to understand the tone, direction and drivers of the current dialog.
• Pick your channels where the conversations about your industry and/or company are taking place and develop your objectives. Defining your channels provides you a starting point in terms of knowing where to focus your efforts. Think about your audience:
       - What do they want to know?
       - What do they need to know?
       - Where do they go to get their relevant information?
       - What social media tools do you need to apply to engage in the conversation?
       - How do you measure the feedback to adjust your positioning and messaging?
• Create relevant, shareable content for your audiences. Whether through blogs, multimedia content, or ratings, reviews, and recommendations, your audiences will be creating and sharing a lot of information.
• Continue to explore other niche-specific properties such as forums, wikis, bulletin boards and other social media applications.
• Track your engagements with influencers and review the related responses and metrics of attention to them.

Social media is a game-changer that is reshaping marketing.  Marketers must avoid the temptation to leverage social media as a new technology to manipulate word-of-mouth messages.  Such tactics are regularly exposed by consumers and typically cause more damage to a company’s reputation than any short-term gains. 

Instead, marketers must develop a social media plan to build trusted relationships by tracking market conversations and engaging responsively in a two-way dialog. 

Whether you call it social media, digital media or new media, there’s no debate over the accelerating popularity of Internet sites and forums where customers are gathering to share opinions and experiences about every product and service imaginable.  The question is, when are you going to engage in the conversation about your company and products?

Tags: Bob Maples, customer communications, digital media, integrated marketing communications, Internet marketing, maples communications, marketing, PR, programs, public relations, search engine marketing, social media, social media plans, Steps