What's your social media strategy?

Determing how social media can work for your business can feel like a daunting task. With so many tactical options, it's important to have a solid strategy.

Simplify the the problem

One technique for approaching a problem that seems complex is to break it down into a series of simpler problems. Instead of looking at a list of 50 ways to use Twitter, it makes more sense to look at a smaller list of ways to use social media in general.

ABCsocialMediaChart.jpgSuch a list might look like this. View Diagram

In fact, you’ll find that any social media strategy probably consists of several of the leaf nodes in this diagram being used in various channels. (For the purposes of this discussion, a social media “channel” is Facebook or a blog or Twitter).

Your challenge then is to identify:

  1. the kind of information your organization has or can generate, ideally something conversational
  2. the types of people you’re trying to reach through social media
  3. the items from the diagram above that can be used to put that information from step (1) in front of those audiences in step (2)
  4. the appropriate channel for each item in step (3)

Now, just because we have a plan of attack doesn’t mean this is necessarily an easy or straightforward task. The best social media strategies look easy in hindsight but have usually been cooked up with some outside the box thinking. The above map is not a magic wand, but it is a starting point.