When planning out a social media strategy, it is just as important to determine what you expect from social media as it is to determine which tools will work the best. Our social media strategy almost always starts with training. This includes both why social media is important and how it can be used. Many clients believe that social media is just twitter and facebook – and it just requires setting up a profile and you;re done. We teach our clients that there is more to social media than those two tools – and we explain the time commitment it takes to get the results that they want. We need the client to understand expectations. In order to do so, we always start with these 3 questions:

1. What is the #1 result you want to see with social media: Increased traffic to the site, more conversation about your brand or increased profits. Of course, most clients tell us that they want all three, but we require that they narrow it down to the number one. This answers gives us some insight on what they expect from social media and whether or not we need some training on how social media works and what is realistic before continuing with a proposal.
2. How much time do you expect to spend on your social media strategy? The answer to this question varies widely – some understand right away that they will need someone constantly monitoring their brand and the conversation, as well as interacting, sharing content and providing a resource. For those that answer this question with “just a few hours a week” tend to need more training. They need to see the level it takes to participate with their community before they can jump into the world.
3. Where do the majority of your clients spend their time online? This question is rarely answerable right away – and often we answer it with the research that we have done ahead of time on the client. But, sometimes the client already knows. Either way, once the main sites have been determined where their clients spend time, we can determine the best of those to begin to create a strategy around. There is no point in being on twitter if your clients aren’t – just like it would be silly to ignore forums if that is where their discussions lie.

Once we have clarified more about the client, their needs, their level of commitment and understanding of social media, we can move onto the actual strategy for social media. In order to do this, we look at what they want to focus on.

If the client wants:

• Better conversation between the consumers and the company, we suggest blogging.
• Listen, monitor, converse and respond to the consumers, we suggest twitter.
• Turn users of their products into fans of the product and reward them, we suggest facebook.
• Ask questions of the users and get feedback in a community, we suggest forums.
• Share how to’s, create viral content and share videos, we suggest youtube.
• Want people to come into their physical store and provide incentives, we suggest whrrl/foursquare.

The actual process is more complex than these simple questions – but this gives you an idea of where we start. These questions capture the main detail of each tool and then we can combine them together to create a complete strategy. We also have other sites that we suggest on rare occasions – when the client need arises.

How did you plan your social media strategy?