6 Easy-To-Remember Steps To Develop Your Social Media Strategy

Developing a social media strategy is one of the first steps to understand how to get your organization’s message out to the world.

It’s not easy. There are no quick fixes, but it’s not just about post­ing a few messages on your channels every week and responding to a couple of comments. It’s about devel­op­ing long-term rela­tion­ships, build­ing trust, and find­ing and bring­ing the right audi­ence to you.

You don’t want to post too many fundrais­ers or ask your audi­ence to par­tic­i­pate in too many cam­paigns with­out pro­vid­ing any use­ful con­tent, advice, or offer­ing to answer ques­tions. Oth­er­wise, you will alien­ate your audi­ence. You want to work on under­stand­ing what your goals are and what you want to give your audi­ence. If you give to them, they will be more will­ing to sup­port you.

The following series will walk you through six steps to develop this strategy — When, Who, Why, What, Where, and How.

Don’t just skip to the how part of this series. It doesn’t work that way!

1. Developing Your Social Media Strategy: When Should You Create This? Who is Your Audience? (Part 1)

2. Developing Your Social Media Strategy: Why Do You Need Goals? (Part 2)

3. Developing Your Social Media Strategy: What Platforms Are You Already Using? (Part 3)

4. Developing Your Social Media Strategy: Where is Your Audience Hanging Out? (Part 4)

5. Developing Your Social Media Strategy: How Will You Do This? (Part 5)

Plus, don’t forget to check out this post: Serial Storytelling on Social Media.

Developing Your Social Media Strategy: What Platforms Are You Already Using? (Part 3)

This is the third in a series of posts about developing your social media strategy. Here, we will look at how to assess your online presence.

How do you currently communicate with your audience online?

How do you currently communicate with your audience online? (Photo credit: Brian Solis)

WHAT Platforms Are You Already Using?

How do you currently communicate with your audience online? It could be through your website, email, press releases, blogs, or social media. Make a list and include the basics in one document. Assessing what you currently have will help you figure out where you can go, and where you should go (covered in more detail later in the HOW section).

While this post is about developing your social media strategy, it is important to keep in mind what other information your organization is pushing out online as well. If you work in a small organization, you may be putting all of this information online yourself. But if you work in a larger organization, this may be divided between several people or departments. In developing your plan and process moving forward, make sure you keep things as integrated as possible.

Most likely, you will be pulling information from your website or email to re-use on social media. So it’s good to know exactly what is being communicated. It will also help you to better respond to your audience. They might ask questions about what’s on the website, or what’s in a press release.

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