Social Media Strategy - from A to Z
Applying Quantitative and Qualitative Measurement to Your Social Media Strategies
By measuring your results against your objectives at regular intervals you can identify strategies and tactics that work well, those that don't and adjust course as necessary. This ensures that the resources such as time, payroll and other expenditures are used wisely. The best time to think about how you'll measure the success of any given strategy is in the development stage. Before you undertake a certain strategy, take the time to establish baselines, targets and benchmarks. So when it comes time to report, you can really articulate your progress. The two types of measurements to determine your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are quantitative and qualitative. Quantitative measurements focus on numerical values and their growth or decline overtime. A good way of thinking about quantitative metrics is through a framework of base, reach, engagement and conversion. For e.g. if you're a health grocery you might be thinking of taking on a content strategy that involves 4 e-books about healthy cooking. First, take a look at your base or potential audience size, in this case, your Facebook and Twitter followers. As you release the books, track your reach through Facebook insights or Twitter analytics. Next, analyze the engagement your posts receive - are you getting a lot of comments and shares around this content? Lastly, track the number of conversions, in this case, downloads of your e-book. If you see growth with every release you can infer that your strategy is resonating with your audience base and then you can look into ways of optimizing other problematic areas. Base and reach numbers are important as they provide a guidance on what strategies and tactics you should focus on. If you only have an audience of 100 people, dedicating resources to developing high quality e-books may not be the best first step. However, engagement and conversion are much more meaningful metrics as they indicate the action taken on your content. So, even if your base audience isn't very large, but a large of shares and conversations are happening around your content - it is indicative of success. The quantitative KPIs you may want to consider for growth are your: follower growth, engagement rate and conversions such as: email sign ups, qualified leads and sales transactions etc. In contrast, qualitative measurement is more nuanced on collecting insight and best done on post by post basis. For e.g. you may have set a goal to increase interactions on your social channel and while the number of comments on your content has gone up - it's also best to analyze the nature of these comments. Do they express positive comments that show love for your products? or is there a lot of disgruntled feedback? Or let's say you've set a goal to connect with influencers in your industry, are those bringing in new customers interested in your brand? Establish reporting intervals that make sense for your strategy analyzing changes in your follower growth every day won't give you a clear picture of your success so look at the trend a period of weeks. Likewise, give you content strategy some time to take hold as you'll need more than a few days of data to make an intelligent assessment of its performance.
Specifying Brand Persona and Voice
Consistency in your communications is crucial. Even if multiple staffers manage your channels, the personality that consistently shines through those interactions should be that of your company - not individual employees. Even if you do use different social media channels for different purposes how you talk to your audience should remain stable across all mediums. To start, it's once again a great idea to talk to your marketing department and see if they have a document in place that defines your brand voice. This should be the foundation for building your voice and engagement style on social channels. Documenting the personality of your brand helps keep communication consistent. This becomes especially important with real time engagement and is useful for guiding the creation of pre-scripted messages as well. Know which adjectives describe your brand, if you don't have a brand strategy already in place then list the words you want your customers to describe you and incorporate them into your brand voice on social. Consider how this voice will relate to your community building approach and the type of content your brand will share. Make sure to check that your messaging on brand.
Putting Together a Content Game Plan
Content marketing has become integral to social media marketing efforts and for good reason. Sharing high quality, relevant content can help your brand develop a close relationship with its audience, establish authority in your industry niche and contribute to overarching business objectives. The key elements of a content strategy are: your target audience, goals, brand voice and distribution channel and tactics. In other words, you want to determine who you're communicating with and how, what you want to achieve in your content and the ways you can effectively distribute it to your audience. Content can come in many forms, such as: blog posts, video, infographics and images. It can come from your teams, crowd-sourced by your audience or curated from relevant, reputable sources. Keep in mind that content can be re-purposed from one channel to the next. When developing your content strategy, important questions to consider are: who will create your content? which channels you'll use to distribute it? and how often? A content calendar is a brilliant tool to keep content organized and gives you a visual representation of you plan.
Simple Breakdown of the Social Media Strategy Components
Executive Summary Social Media Audit (Social Media, Traffic Sources, Customer Demographics and Competitor Assessments) Social Media Objectives Online Brand Persona and Voice Strategies (Paid, Owned and Earned) and Tools (Social Media Management Program or other applications) Timing and Key Dates (Holiday dates, internal events, reporting dates etc.) Social Media Roles and Responsibilities Social Media Policy Critical Response Plan (Scenarios, Action Plans or, if applicable, pre-approved messaging) Measurements and Reporting Results (Quantitative KPIs, Website Traffic Sources Assessment and Social Network Data, Individual Campaign Performances, Qualitative KPIs, Proposed Action Items) - this determines social return on investment (ROI)
Essential Components of a Social Media Strategy
Foundational Components: Social media audit, social media goals and objectives and the budget, tactics and tools. With the foundational components of your strategy, you'll not only consider successes and opportunities but also create the strategic plan for supporting organizational goals. Whether that involve social ads, business blogs or the creation of influencer strategy. You'll also need to incorporate a: content strategy (for the types and amounts of posts you'll share), a clearly defined brand persona and voice as well as a calendar of key dates for your organization.
Factoring in Timing and Dates
Identifying individual key dates and time lines for the year is essential when planning your social media activity as you want to ensure you have enough time to prepare for seasons and holidays that matter most for your business. For e.g. let's say your a non-profit organization, with a specific holiday campaign to drive donations. You've decided to develop a series of blog posts with previous donors; supplemented with visual media of your volunteers and staff. In this case, you'll need to specify the period of time when you'll be developing your content, the dates when you'll be releasing it and the overall duration of your campaign. Elements you'll want to consider are: staffing (who'll be responsible for monitoring your social feeds, and who'll be tasked with answer questions and address concerns), training and technology. Ask yourself: do I have the resources to execute this campaign, as planned, on time and on budget? Other timing factors to consider are reporting intervals. In order to measure the success of your campaign you need to evaluate its effectiveness overtime. You may check its performance on a: monthly, quarterly or semi-annual basis. Before your due to report give yourself enough time to pull all the necessary data and produce a thoughtful analysis of the results. You made need to consider internal events that need social media amplification. Like company volunteer events or award ceremonies and follow the same process to ensure you can offer adequate support.
What is a Social Media Strategy?
It's the strategic plan for how a company will incorporate social media into its business.
Using Data to Adjust Course
Once you've gathered the data on your KPIs it's time to adjust course by optimizing your strategy or pursuing a different direction. You can split this process in three parts: gathering the data, analyzing it and taking action based on the insights the data provides. What story does the data you've pulled tell you? Let's say you wanted to drive traffic to your website from your social properties. Using Google Analytics, you may be able to see that referral traffic is higher from one social network but lower on another. Examine social posts that were successful in leading your visitors to your website and think of how you can adapt them to your other social networks to generate similar results. Examine the post that didn't perform as successfully, maybe that type of content doesn't resonate with the users of that particular network. Evaluate it by asking questions like: can it be better targeted? can it be posted at a different time? While analyzing the numbers is important what's especially critical is taking action. Once a strategy has been proven to be less than stellar and you've taken the time to optimize it - there's nothing wrong with trying something new. Monitoring the response from your community is important. Often your followers will be vocal about what kind of content and activity they approve of. Benchmark yourself to your competition as well. Is their following growing at a significantly faster rate? Is their content drawing a large amount of positive feedback? what are they doing that's working well? and can you adapt some ideas to your social strategy? Seasonality will play a role in your data, so be sure to check back in your historical results, as well as those who are your competition. It's important to review and adjust your overall social media strategy as your company grows and organizational goals change.
Implementing Social Media Governance Within Your Organization
Social media governance is a collection of documents organizations create with the purpose of ensuring employees reflect company values and best practices in their personal or professional social media activities. Lack of social media governance may result in misuse or unauthorized use of company profile credentials, inappropriate employee conduct in social media and a lack of or out of date social media education within your organization. This opens you up to legal risks, brand damage and lost revenue. The five parts that make up social media governance: scope, process of creating and updating documentation, approvals, social media policy and education and training. The scope should clearly communicate who and what your social governance applies to. For e.g. does it both affect customer social media interaction and personal social media use? The process of creating and updating documentation should outline the process of governance documentation. This ensures your policy keeps with the ever evolving social media landscape. Record how your governance documentation was created and how it should be updated going forward. Including a plan for regular maintenance. Also include mechanisms that collect employee feedback and questions. An organizations social governance should also include approvals and operational considerations for internal social media practitioners. This should include the process of setting up official channels, transferring account ownership and designating who can use official social channels and when. Larger organizations may also specify who needs to approve posts before they're published and what that approvals process looks like. Organizations that contract out part of their social media activities should also define these relationships and how 3rd party contractors work with the core team. The largest part of the social media governance plan is the social media policy which protects a brands integrity and reputation by outlining appropriate and inappropriate uses of social media by employees and professionally. The first part of a social media policy outlines best practices for personal social media use. The goal here is to empower employees to represent their organization positively. Include advice for maintaining public facing profiles like LinkedIn and sharing personal content and information about the organization and engaging with other social media users respectfully. Specify whether or not employees should interact with customers online with their personal accounts and if so, what are the rules to positive engagement? As a a best practice, encourage fellow employees to keep all interactions on social positive and respectful. The social media policy should outline any discouraged behaviours and activities. For e.g. employees shouldn't: engage with hostile customers, criticize competitors and share strategic information. The social media policy should also outline expectations and standards for client facing social media use. Specifically, rules pertaining to employees with access to official social channels. Finally, be sure to clearly detail the implications of failing to abide by the rules of social media policy. Such as verbal or written warnings, penalties or even termination. Once your scope, crafting and updating documents, approvals and social media policies are all outlined, it's time to consider education and training. Every employee is a potential brand ambassador so think hard on how you can best educate them about your organizations social media policies and procedures. This requires working throughout the organization including with HR and training teams to ensure that all staff are on board and trained up.
Creating a Crisis Management Plan
Social media managers need to create Crisis Management Plans to prepare in advance for crisis, mitigate risk and increase the likelihood of a positive outcome. The first, and most important, element of a Crisis Management Plan is a social media monitoring strategy. Monitoring is a vital for identifying and responding to external issues and crisis on social media before they spiral out of control. Your monitoring strategy should specify all the terms, names and hashtags etc. That should be monitored for your organization. It's important to arm yourself with pre-approved messages to address internal and external issues. Start by brainstorming possible scenarios that could arise for your organization. For e.g. service outages or hacks, natural disasters in your region or PR disasters involving employees. Coordinate with marketing teams to gather existing messaging and ensure that anything you create specifically for social strikes the right tone and conveys the appropriate information. Preparing for pre-approved messaging allows for quick responses, but whenever possible have an in the moment discussion with stakeholders about the chosen response prior to posting. In your document, list out the possible incidents and associated messages needed to deal with them. You want these resources to be easy to find and use. Your Crisis Management Plan should also include a list of decision makers, the platforms they manage and all contact information. Include a decision tree that defines the process that should unfold should a crisis be identified. Employees will need a guideline distinguishing a crisis and a general issue so appropriate next steps can be set in motion. Each organization will have a different conception of what constitutes a crisis. So work with internal stakeholders to come up with a definition that reflects your business context. When crisis does unfold, it's best to work with PR to create messaging specific to the incident in question. The decision tree should also include information like: who should be engaged as a situation develops, when to pause publishing activities and when to make a statement. It's also a best practice to choose a decision maker that evaluates whether or not a crisis has been dealt with and normal social channel activities can continue.
Tactics and Tools to Consider
Social media tactics are fine grained, short term actions that flow from and support your social media objectives. Social media tactics can be grouped into three buckets: Paid, Owned and Earned. Most businesses use a mixture of all three. Tactics are in turn supported by 3rd party software tools - like Hootsuite and Google Analytics. 3rd party tools have a wide range of uses: from surfacing trending content and measuring audience sentiment, to running campaigns and scheduling hundreds of social messages at once. To understand how tactics can be used to support objectives let's think through an example: Let's say you have a social media objective to drive a certain volume of social mentions of a branded hashtag relevant to the opening of a hotel location for three months following its opening. An Owned tactic would involve serving messages and content organically through your organization's official social channels. In this case, an Owned tactic could be to schedule two tweets per-day for one month containing beautiful images of the area around the hotel. Encouraging your audience to tweet back with the branded hashtag with images of their own showing fun experiences followers have had in the region. An Earned tactic would involve community engagement, spurring online conversations about your organization by gaining the voluntary support of influencers, advocates and employees to boost awareness on social channels. In this case, Earned tactic could be to identify a regional social media influencer and invite them to spend a complimentary weekend in the hotel documenting their experience on Instagram and Snapchat channel. A Paid tactic would involve spending money to get social messaging and content in front of your target audience. Using for e.g. social ads, boosted posts or paid influencers. Paid tactics have become increasingly important because of the decline of organic views and because of the overall increase in the volume of content being published on social channels. A supporting paid tactic could be a Facebook post that's already performing well organically. Third party software tools increase the efficiency and effectiveness of social marketing tactics. So when your tactics are developed, it's time to look at tools that will enable you to execute them effectively. When thinking of tools needed for a given social tactic or objective start by looking at your organizations existing memberships and licenses to see what can be utilized. You should utilize content surfacing tools such as: UpContent, Right Relevance and BuzzSumo. To stay on top of relevant news and industry trends. Flashstock is a great source of custom visual content to support important campaigns or product launches in social channels. If your organization doesn't already have a license or a membership for a tool needed for tactical success it may require budget, which means you'll need to prepared to make your case for any increases made to acquire these tools.
Setting Goals, Objectives and KPIs
The best social strategy is one that methodically outlines how social media will support your organization's initiatives. To do this, you'll need to set social media goals and objectives that clearly contribute to organizational success. Begin by think hard about your departmental goals then formulate social media goals that explicitly support them. For e.g. if your organization has a goal to build awareness around a new hotel location, your social media goal might be as simple as increasing awareness of that new location among target customers on your channels. Once you settle on a social media goal, you'll need to design actions that can support it. This is where objectives come in. Social media objectives are specific measurable steps that will be taken in support of a social media goal. When designing objectives, refer back to the SWOT of your social media audit and formulate objectives that play to your STRENGTHS and OPPORTUNITIES. While avoiding WEAKNESSES and THREATS. The SMART (Specific, measurable, achievable, resourced and time bound) format should also guide the construction of your objective. So they're optimized for achievement. Data from your social media audit will be crucial to making your objectives achievable. For e.g. if brand mentions on Twitter only increased by 25% last year, a 75% increase is probably unlikely. Along side your social media objectives comes the process of choosing and setting your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). When your setting KPIs your essentially honing in the measurable factor of your SMART rule. Asking yourself which metric determines the success or failure of your social media efforts. KPIs, like your social media objectives, should be set on what your team can actually do to influence the achievement of the objective. That is, KPIs should only measure things that your team has direct control over. Once you've established a KPI by choosing relevant metrics, you'll need to settle on a target number that's achievable, yet ambitious. The best method for determining future targets is to establish benchmarks, you can do this by extrapolating past data from previous efforts to estimate future success. For e.g. if you're partnering with a Youtube influencer look at the view counts of their past videos and base your KPI target on that data. Using data and benchmarking will help you to understand what to expect and enable you to set effective targets.
Budgeting for a Social Media Program
The budgeting process is an important part of achieving ambitious social media goals. Effective budgeting involves showcasing the value of your strategy to senior leadership, a plan for carefully managing company resources and securing the resources needed for success. Social media managers should begin the budgeting process well before final budget numbers are settled to influence how much they'll be awarded. For e.g. if Q1 starts on January 1st then preparations could begin as early as Q3 of their previous year (July) Starting early will ensure you make the most persuasive and data driven case possible for securing the resources you need to achieve social media goals. When pitching your budget to decision makers, consider conveying two things: demonstrate ROI from the current year and then showcase the value of the initiatives, campaigns and goals you in mind for the coming year and how your proposed budget will support these. The best way to showcase the value of what you hope to accomplish in the coming year is to come to the table with well thought out social media: goals, objectives and supporting tactics. Most importantly, present how these support broader organization goals. Part of fleshing out your social media tactics for the coming year is determining what tools you'll need and their cost. Consider what software, contractors and other equipment will be required and have a solid business case prepared. Third party vendors often have polished resources that highlight the value to your organization. It's also wise to show what your competitors are doing and how you can keep up or surpass their efforts. When proposing a budget, considering proposing an experimentation fund which can be used to take advantage of new trends and industry developments. This is ideal for social teams as networks and advertising techniques often launch with very little notice and require immediate action to capitalize properly. If your business is unable to provide this consider setting aside a portion of your budget for this purpose. Eventually, you'll be assigned your budget for the year whether its increased, decreased or stayed the same - you'll need to split it up by month. To allocate resources effectively, look at the pace of business across your fiscal year and factor in seasonality. Work with whoever controls the data within your company to understand customer trends that may impact when and where your budget is best spent. For e.g. if you're a travel company, you might allocate more budget to months with holidays and spring vacation. Also factor in: larger marketing campaigns, company acquisitions, important announcements - as these events may require more funding. Be proactive in looking at social trends and opportunities for improvement and shift resources around accordingly.
Conducting a Social Media Audit
The purpose of a Social Media Audit is to analyze the effectiveness of existing social media efforts. And to understand audience behaviour, competitors and trends. A Social Media Audit includes three components: An audience analysis (website traffic and demographic assessments), an internal analysis (social media assessment) and competitive audits (competitor assessment). An audience analysis provides insight into who you're currently reaching and where potential customers might be found. To do this, look closely at each of your followers in all your social channels to identify who you're reaching by demographic. Next, identify the audience you want to target and ask yourself: what social channel are they on? and how can I tailor my approach to reach them? Although your organization may already have reporting methods in place, it's a best practice to complete a detailed internal audit prior to embarking in crafting a new social media strategy. Begin by listing all social properties, posting frequency, follower counts, engagement rates and referral traffic to your website over each month, for the previous year. This is also the time to identify any unauthorized, off brand or forgotten accounts. And either report, delete or update them. Once you've collected the necessary information, evaluate your current channels and considering under performing accounts or shifting resources toward channels that better reach your target audience. You should also identify top performing and poorly performing content and use this knowledge when creating a content strategy later on. A thorough internal audit will allow you to contextualize your progress by looking back at your numbers and analyzing your improvements. Next, perform a competitive audit to learn form your competitors' successes and failures. To do this, look at your competitors on a per channel basis, gather their basic metrics so that you can determine your share of voice and either build, grow or maintain it. Ask yourself: what content of theirs is outperforming our own? and how can we use this information to tailor our approach? In a competitive audit, you can also look to aspirational brands even those outside of your market for inspiration. For e.g. a hotel chain that's interested in improving their strategy on Snapchat could take inspiration from a retail clothing brand that's succeeding in that network. Finally, wrap up your audit with an overall summary of your findings. The two most popular methods of doing this are the: Stop Start Continue format or the SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) analysis. Stop Start Continue is useful and informal way to identify different actions you'd like to start, if they seem promising, stop, if they're in effective, or continue, if they're doing well. Other organizations take a more formal approach by using the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats analysis. This analysis can be used to gain an understanding of your competitors and gain insights for crafting your strategy. Overall, the key question you need to consider is: what value is your company adding to your customers through social NOW vs the value you WANT to be adding.
How to Set Up the Roles and Responsibilities on Your Team
To effectively execute your social media strategy it's important to have a set of defined roles and responsibilities for each member of your team. Before you start, first review who has the access to your branded social media channels including third party apps in which you have granted access. While the titles of the following positions may differ determine who will fulfil these key roles: Social media manager, director and coordinator. In small companies, one person may perform the responsibilities of all these roles. Social Media Directors will typically be involved in: higher level planning and have final approval of social media budgets, campaigns and strategies. Social Media Managers will plan and oversee day-to-day executions of the social media strategy and manage all running campaigns to ensure they run smoothly and deployed on time. Social Media Coordinators are in charge of publishing content such as tweets and Facebook posts whilst monitoring engagement and respond to questions. Some companies set up a schedule that shares the responsibility of monitoring an engagement among multiple people throughout the week, including the weekend. You can also assign responsibility on a per-network basis. One coordinator may manage the Instagram page, whilst another may handle the Twitter account. Lastly, you'll want to choose somebody who'll create blog posts, photos and videos etc. Depending on the size of your company, this may be done by your social media team or in conjunction with the marketing department or agency. It's important to plan for times of high volume social media activities, such as product launches or negative commentary from a prominent community member or media. To prepare for this, you may want to consider training additional employees on your social media strategy. These team members should be well versed on your social media policy and processes. So they can jump in should there be a crisis, unexpected departure or prolonged absence of key personnel.
The Value of a Social Media Strategy
To minimize wasted effort, time and data it's essential to spend time to develop a comprehensive and unified social media strategy that compliments your existing marketing objectives. A social strategy that's aligned with the essential elements of your business can help your company accomplish its objectives. Whether they involve: increasing customer satisfaction, generating more sales leads or driving web traffic and higher revenue. It also provides clarity, guidance and documentation of your processes and policy to ensure optimized work flow and adherence to best practices across your organization.
