Chapter 6: Managing Social Media Communications and Planning Cycles

Planning Process

1. Set Strategic Objectives 2. Strategic Plan 3. Implementation Plan 4. Establish Policies 5. Allocate Resources, Set Key Responsibilities 6. Compile Calendars, Set Timelines 7. Evaluate Progress 8. Adjust Strategy

What is a big reason why great social media strategies fail on implementation?

A lack of clarity with respect to who does what

Learn About Your Audience

Buhi's primary market falls between the ages of 19 - 32; 90% of all Buhi customers fall into this age group

Which is not one of the social media planning stages?

Count your existing followers

Stage 6: Compile Calendars, Set Timelines

Frequency of Planning Communication - Daily

Why is stage 3 (implementation plan) so important?

It's where the strategic plan gets converted into specific action items

Evaluating the progress of your social media strategy takes place at two levels. One of these levels is:

Measuring performance against strategic objectives on a regular basis

What is the key to making a great social media marketing strategy a success?

Planning

With social media marketing you have to be:

Responsive, nimble, and willing to adjust along the way

Forms for Planning

Specific (specific campaigns); Broad (ongoing activities that are not specific to any marketing campaign/promotional cadence)

A good social media communications calendar will usually start by determining what for each week?

The Theme

A big difference between social media calendars and traditional media calendars as discussed in this chapter is:

Time Frequency

Developing the implementation plan should involve everyone who was involved with the strategy and everyone who will be involved with implementation.

True

Does a social media communications calendar need to be aware of other calendars within the marketing the marketing department such as advertising, or in-store promotions?

Yes

Stage 5: Allocate Resources, Set Key Responsibilities

adequate budges need to be assigned; key people involved need to be given tasks and responsibilities

Planning

getting organized, so that strategies are implemented efficiently, on schedule, and effectively

Brands should come across as

human

Importance of Detailed Planning

key to making a great social media marketing strategy a success is planning; has to operate at a fairly fine-grained level: have detailed plans for each day

Stage 4: Establish Policies

policies are important to handle risks; e.g. nothing happens/risk adverse; know what/to whom/when to/no to say something/how to say something

Stage 8: Adjust Strategy

procedure that allows companies to feed all the lessons learned along the way back into the social media marketing strategy

Stage 3: Implementation Plan

strategies get converted into specific action items that should be implemented; effectively (achieves the objectives), on schedule, efficiently (doesn't incur excessive costs)

Stage 7: Evaluate Progress

two levels of evaluating: measure performance against strategic objectives on a regular basis; re-evaluate the Implementation Plan, Policies, and Timelines