6 Essential Steps for Executing Your Social Media Strategy
It’s easy to plan a squeaky clean social media strategy for your business when it’s on paper. But executing all of the day-to-day tasks involved in that strategy can be a different story — and a giant, tangled mess — without implementing processes to manage it.
Thankfully, there are plenty of tools and strategies that can help community management teams communicate with each other, stay on the same page, schedule posts and cooperate with other departments.
Before you launch your strategy, consider how you will manage the execution. These six steps can help get you started.
1. Define Your Content Mission
Don’t start your social media process without thinking about what you’re trying to accomplish. Select your content accordingly.
International development organization Community Lab is striving to be a hub where supporters can learn about how they can make a difference. Therefore, its community engagement coordinator, Phi Pham, says he feels comfortable posting any content that has a relationship to some sort of cause or issue related to international development or international relations.
At local recommendation search engine Bizzy, however, the goal is to promote the brand and its full relaunch. Community manager Emily Hurley says she focuses on early adopters and tech-savvy consumers. On Facebook, however, the company tries to be accessible to a wider audience. The company includes announcements and tries to create brand awareness on both accounts, but is careful to not use the platforms merely as broadcast mechanisms.
“One unofficial guideline is to be real people online. No one likes to follow a corporate Twitter (
) bot,” Hurley says.
2. Explore Social Media Management Tools
There are a slew of quality tools that can help you manage your social media accounts, and many of them are free.
HootSuite (
), one of the most popular tools for scheduling, posting and monitoring multiple accounts from one spot, recently surpassed 1 million users. Despite the popularity of this dashboard, Pham discourages social media managers from relying on it as their only management tool.
“The biggest mistake I have seen is that people get too lazy with their content posting,” he says. “They’ll want one main tool to post on all their social media accounts, and I don’t think there is one main tool to do that.”
Community Lab uses a variety of tools, including HootSuite, to maximize the capability of each network. For Facebook, Community Lab posts directly to the site and uses a spreadsheet in Dropbox () to schedule and aggregate content.
3. Keep Track of Who Is Posting
Having multiple people on your corporate accounts can create a situation ripe for double posts, mistimed announcements and general confusion about who is doing what when.
One solution is to have just one person post to all accounts. For Josh Pelz, the sole in-house social media person at Gansevoort Hotel Group, this is his only option. While it clears up any confusion, he says it can also be a bit overwhelming and takes up a lot of time that could be spent on bigger projects.
Another option is to divide the posting responsibility into shifts. Community Lab has one person who is responsible for posting during the weekdays and another person who is responsible on weekends.
Bizzy divides its local accounts among its community managers, making each person responsible for one account. Hurley oversees the main Twitter account and the Facebook Page. She says that this strategy is helpful in metering out content, so that multiple people don’t flood an account and that each person can maintain conversations. In some cases, however, she says that it might be more appropriate to use a “divide and conquer” strategy like Community Lab’s.
“The one caveat perhaps is that you make it a high priority to make sure conversations don’t get lost in the shuffle,” she says. “When one person is engaged with another user, that person owns that conversation as it continues.”
4. Be Cohesive
Even if multiple people post to your accounts, it’s important that what one person is posting doesn’t contradict or clash with what another person is posting. This has been especially important for Bizzy because it has multiple local accounts, as well as national accounts, that are run by different people.
Here’s how they stay on the same page, according to Hurley: “We have one main Twitter account that acts as a feed to our localized accounts, so we can maintain some control over when we release or link to certain things. Our local community managers use that stream to trigger announcements that they can then propagate across their own accounts. With that methodology, we can maintain some cohesiveness as a brand, but still allow our local folks to go make their localized accounts their own, with their own personality.”
5. Measure Success
Tools like Tap11 and HootSuite can help you compile social media analytics. But depending on how you define success, these numbers might not be the most important factor in your strategy.
“We ask ourselves questions like, ‘Are we learning from our users?’ ‘Do our users talk about us to their friends?’ ‘What are the positive things they say?’ ‘What are their most frequent concerns or questions?’” Hurley says.
This sort of information can only be gathered and measured through successful social media monitoring.
6. Report Your Results
Decide how often you will report on your social media activities and what you’ll include.
The report should include specifics — Pham compiles graphs of growth rates, summaries of the data, and explanations of why any data that stands out occurs during her weekly reports. But broader explanations of trends are also useful — Pelz says his reports take the form of a conversation with the rest of the marketing and PR department.
If you find yourself stuck, or simply don’t have the time or resources; Call a reputable Social Media Marketing or PR Firm. Make sure they define clear goals and lay out concise and realistic expectations.
Thank you to Sarah Kessler for this post.
Boasting 90 million users, 
The biggest new feature of LinkedIn Companies is the addition of the Products & Services tab. Your company can list each of its products or services, upload a 100 x 80 pixel icon and description of each, and create a bullet list of attributes. Pretty standard, right?
Probably the most important new feature is the ability to solicit recommendations from your customers for each of your products or services. This works just like the Recommendations feature does on an individual LinkedIn profile. You’ll want to take the time to edit the default message when asking for an endorsement.
This is where LinkedIn Companies gets powerful. LinkedIn allows you to completely customize how you present your products and services to distinct audience segments.
Each product or service (for each audience segment) also has a placeholder for a unique offer associated with it. For example, you can easily create an offer for a free white paper or a free coupon for your tasty and delicious consumer packaged good.
