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: Where is Your Audience Hanging Out? (Part 4)

This is the fourth part of a series of posts about developing your social media strategy. Here, we will discuss finding your audience online.

Can you find your audience, or are they hiding too?

Can you find your audience, or are they hiding? (Photo credit: Dan Zen

WHERE is Your Audience Hanging Out?

Are they on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr or somewhere else? How many platforms you can actively participate in depends on your budget. By actively participating, I mean pushing out useful content, soliciting feedback, and engaging in a dialogue.

However, you can still maintain a presence on other platforms, even if you are only able to update it once every two weeks. Of course, if you can, it would be best to monitor it every day just for any questions that need an immediate response, but that should not take too much time.

It’s important to have that presence to reserve the url for your business or nonprofit, but you also want to let people know that you’re out there. It can take a long time to build up a following, so if you decide you’re not going to be that active on Google+ yet, you can set up an account for that time when things may change. Then you will have the customized url you need, plus some followers.

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