The W’s of a Social Media Strategy- The What

February 29th, 2012 by admin

Yesterday I wrote about “The Who” of a Social Media Strategy. Today’s post discusses “The What” and tomorrow I’ll be writing about “The Where.”

When thinking about The What of a social media strategy, we need to look at three things:
1)       What are the short and long term goals
2)       What kind of content will you be pushing out
3)       What are the guidelines for your community manager

Goals
Any good strategy begins with identifying measurable short and long term goals. In terms of social media, you can consider…
- we will start now on X amount of platforms and within 6 months that will increase
- how many blog posts you will write weekly
- the number of Facebook status updates and Tweets (this is obviously a function of how much content you push out, how many people you connect with etc)
- how many foundations, businesses you attempt to connect with each month

Ultimately, you want social media to create the highest ROE (Return On Engagement) possible. You engage new people who never heard of you, you build brand awareness, you use it to strengthen and expand prominent programs, you recruit volunteers and down the road- potentially launch a campaign.

This, however, is NOT a goal: determining in advance how many followers/Likes you will have each month. You do not control that!!!!! Much of that is a function of the content you are posting and being able to engage followers. It is more important to have a small number of followers who repost your content than have thousands of followers who do not engage at all.

Simply put: quality trumps quantity.

Content
This is very important and needs to be thought about in advance. On social media, people prefer more Ann Landers than Walter Cronkite. Your goal is to build relationships, not be a broadcaster!

When considering content, remember the 60-30-10 rule: 60% of your content should be posts and tweets others have posted, 30% should be conversations with others and 10% about your organization. Not to worry: as you build a following, that 10% will get retweeted and reposted by others allowing their followers to learn about your organization, read your blog posts and more.

An additional component is content you read and want to share with your followers. This could be articles related to your field of expertise or something funny people will enjoy. As your following grows, you’ll be able to gauge what content causes the most reactions.

Guidelines
Your organization needs to establish clear guidelines for your community manager.
► There may be topics you do not want them to discuss- religion or politics.
► How to handle negative comments- do not delete, answer politely & respectfully
► What to do in case something inappropriate is posted
► What types of contests and promotions can be run

And much more. By creating clear guidelines at the outset, your community manager will know what is expected of them.

Now you just have to go out and engage…

I work with nonprofit organizations and nonprofit consultants to create social media strategies. Be in touch- I won’t bite!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 29th, 2012 at 4:53 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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