Noe A.
Calmorin
Steps in Planning a Social Media Initiative
Social media is quickly becoming a regularly embraced channel to run marketing,
communications, lead generation and customer support programs. And while you may be
testing the waters with social media, your customers are using these channels to talk about
you, your brand and the topics that matter to your business. These conversations are
happening, so planning out your efforts in social media needs to become a priority for your
company.
There are seven areas every brand needs to assess and plan as they incorporate social media as
a main element in the marketing and customer care mix. Following these seven core steps will
help you define a sound strategy and build the foundation for ongoing, programmatic social
media activity.
I. Align social media with corporate objectives
If your social media goals dont align with those of management and your corporate strategy,
your programs will never be successful in the eyes of internal stakeholders.
Define your initiatives. Outline what sets of activity you plan to partake in and define how
many separate initiatives you will be running in all.
Set objectives and goals. Decide what objectives align with each set of initiative activity.
Knowing what goals you have will allow you to prove the success of the effort.
Justify social media through corporate goal alignment. Tie together your objectives, the
process to achieve them and what key performance indicators will show success.
II. Organize your social team
Social media work always starts and ends with the people behind the initiatives. Organizing this
group in a meaningful way will help ensure effective and efficient social media activity.
Establish social media voices. Decide and define what brands, personas and individuals will be
engaging on behalf of your initiative.
Engage part time contributors. You may not have a large team of contributors, yet, but you
can find people internally who can help add relevant and interesting content to your initiative.
III. Baselining your social presence
Discover where your brand is in the universe of social media activity as well as what is being
said about other relevant brands and topic pertinent to your industry.
Listen to current sentiment. Find out if users are referencing you in a positive, neutral or
negative way.
Get smart on your competition. Monitor what type of mentions, engagement and overall
activity is taking place by them and their communities.
Client and prospects. Know your target market by tuning into what they are doing in social
media and how it pertains to you.
IV. Planning your communication
Be proactive in developing a communications plan for your initiatives to map the right type of
content and maintain a consistent mix.
Identify content opportunities. Formulate a list of the types of content you should be creating
and sharing in social media based on what your target market wants.
Schedule your work. At a high level, schedule out what major milestones need to be covered
in an initiative. Then, pre-schedule actual social media activity days or even weeks in advance.
V. Engaging in the right places at the right time
Pull together all learnings from baselining to determine the best channels to use and how often
you should use them.
Narrow down the choices. Assess the Big Six social media channels to pinpoint the right mix
for your initiative(s).
Focus on strengths: yours and the target channels. Dive into what strengths each presents.
Understand frequency requirements. Gauge the optimal frequency for each channel youve
chosen to understand how often activity should take place to meet the needs of you and your
audience.
VI. Measuring your work
Measure communications to determine the results and implications of your social media
initiatives.
Assess the top three metrics. Track the amount of outbound activity you produce (Activity),
the number of potential social impressions from your network seeing and sharing your activity
(Reach) and meaningful ways users interact with your activity (Engagement).
Track and communicate progress. Establish how you plan to track the above metrics in an
ongoing way and subsequently communicate them to the right stakeholders.
VII. Integrating with your other processes and systems
Realize that social media is a segment of your overall communications mix that needs to be
integrated with both processes and current technology.
Integrate with your current processes. Find ways to integrate social media with other channel
activity such as email, websites and offline events.
Technical integration. Tie in social media information to both your Web Analytics, as well as
your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system
