Social Media Strategy

In a social media world where every blog has posts on 10 ways to XYZ it’s easy to see why many can get drawn into the doing before doing too much of the thinking.

All to often social media campaigns fall down because they start downstream, they are focussed around platforms or content or interactions. Twitter is the hot new kid on the block so let’s have some, rather than creating a well rounded social media strategy that’s aligned with business objectives.

If you start upstream it will be easy to see where everything fits in, creativity may be needed, in some cases just downright hard work, but you can’t prescribe the approach until you know where it’s going and how it fits in with everything else.

Upstream is where the thinking takes place, downstream is where the thinking is implemented and tasks are carried out.

Do you hire an agency? That’s decided upstream, formulating strategy is all about opportunity and capability, is there an opportunity that suits our goals and if so do we have the capability to take advantage of it?

Once you have a strategy you can start to formulate a plan, select platforms, decide on content and how to interact.

Whatever you do, don’t be task driven or creative driven, neither will work if you don’t have a social media strategy.

I’m going to put together a little toolkit that will hopefully help people easily put together a social media strategy and sell it to their boss, I will update this post when it’s online.