One of the questions that businesses frequently ask when starting on their social media journey is how to make it a day-to-day part of what they do. The answer is to think strategically.

There is an understandable temptation to say “we need to be on Twitter“, without giving it much more thought than that. Pausing first and asking a few key questions means that you can still jump on the Twitter bandwagon, but you can do it in a way that will be sustainable and deliver real value.

For example:

• Who is going to Tweet on behalf of the company?
• Are the people you want to reach actually on Twitter?
• Will they use their own name, or the company name or a combination?
• What guidelines will they operate within?
• What will they say, and how will the impact of what they say be tracked?

These are simple questions to answer, but answering them first will make your life easier.

When we work with clients we like to borrow the excellent POST methodology from the book Groundswell. The idea is simply to work through a number of steps before launching a social media campaign.

P is for People: Who do you want to reach? What is your target audience? Where do they spend their time when they are online?

O is for Objectives: Decide on your primary objective for reaching out to the target group? What do you want from them? Is raising awareness enough? How will you measure what your impact?

S is Strategy: How are you going to achieve your objective? What are you going to do for your customers/targets? What will be different after you have acted?

T is for Technology: Technology is fun because of what it allows us to do, but we should remember it is a tool and not an end in itself. Starting with the technology kinda puts the horse before the cart… so only after the three points above have good answers should we start looking at what technology we will use to meet our goals.

Hopefully you can see how a little bit of time invested up-front in social media planning can increase your chances of success, as well as making it possible to simply make social media just part of what you do.

Of course, you can make your life easier still and get us to help you!