How to Put Together a Basic Social Media Strategy in 4 Steps

by Monika Jansen on December 6, 2010

If you became tired of hearing about how you have to use social media and decided to start using Facebook and Twitter and maybe writing a blog without a strategy in place, stop, cease, desist, halt! As you know, a strategy is basically a roadmap. You can’t get to where you’d like to go with social media unless you know how to get there and why you even want to get there in the first place.

Don’t feel bad, though. I did the same thing as you. The pressure to use social media is absolutely overwhelming, but taking the time to put together a proper strategy will help you yield actual results. I pulled most of this information from my own social media strategy, which is certainly not exhaustive, but it will get the job done. My next post will be on executing your social media strategy, and I’ll address the whole blog aspect in a different post as well, so stay tuned!

Here are the 4 steps you’ll need to take to put together a social media strategy:

Step One: Decide what your goals are.

Are you going to use social media to increase sales of certain products or services, generate leads, build brand awareness, become a thought leader in your industry, or a combination of all four? Because it’s probably a combination of all four, prioritize your goals.

Step Two: Decide what keywords are most important to you.

Put together a list of your top SEO keywords. You’ll need this later on.

Step Three: Find your customers and potential customers online.

Make sure you’re using the social media platforms where your customers are spending time. Flowtown can help you learn what your customers are doing and saying on which social platforms, and it even connects you to them on the social networks they use the most.

This is kinda Step Three and a Half. Listen to what people are already saying about the topics you want to talk about (see Step Two above). Set up alerts on SocialMention, Klout and Google so you can join the discussions that are already happening.

After doing these two things, you’ll know which social media platforms you should pay the most attention to and spend time on.

Step Four: Set up a social media dashboard.

Save time and make your life easier by setting up an account with a social media dashboard like Hootsuite. You can monitor all of your social media streams in one place, use their analytics tool to track how well you’re doing, and schedule updates across for all social media platforms at once.

Next up in the “3 Steps to Social Success” series: how to execute your social media strategy without losing your mind!

Image by Flickr User: szczel (Creative Commons)