Stop, think, strategize before implementing social media

So you’ve decided that you need to be in social media. The tendency is jump on it and create the Facebook page and the Twitter account right now. 

It’s easy, so why not.

Hold on. As they say, anything that’s worth doing is difficult. If social media were that easy, it wouldn’t be worth doing. Either you need to re-evaluate your reasons for jumping into social or you need to back up and consider the strategy first.

Here’s how I look at social media and the steps I would take in developing a social media presence. (Of course, there are a lot of ways to do this, but this is my preferred method.)

1. Determine what you want to accomplish that might involve social media. The “might” is key. It is always possible that social media isn’t the best tool to use. If it isn’t the right tool or a supporting tool, don’t use it and wait until it is the right tool before you implement a strategy. I say this because there are still a lot of skeptics at the executive level and you don’t want your first foray into social media to be a failure. You want it to be successful.
2. Look at your overall business goals and write out how social media fits into those business goals. Even if you’re not the CEO, this is an important step. If social media is going to work for you, you have to see its value in the grand scheme of things.
3. Craft a social media strategy. The strategy must, absolutely must, refer to your overall business objectives. If it does not, the strategy will be nothing more than a science project. The goals you write into the strategy should support the overall business goals.
4. Double, triple, quadruple check that you can implement the strategy with minimal resources. Social media activities can quickly consume the time and energy of your people, and you are rarely allowed to hire a social media guru, especially when you get started. You have to prove the case.
5. Take baby steps toward implementation. It’s normal for any strategy involving a shiny new tool to be grandiose in nature. If you’re a visionary person like me, you might believe that it could reshape the entire organization. Take a step back from that and implement it in bite-sized chunks, testing one small element of the strategy at a time. This will help you find the social media groove that works for your organization. Over time, it will slowly become an important brick in the foundation of your marketing efforts. 

That’s the magic of slowly integrating social media into your efforts through strategy rather than tactics. If you throw everything at social media too fast, it becomes an organization fad, something we tried once that didn’t work. The only reason it didn’t work was because you threw everything at it.

Like any new technology or medium, especially those that are evolving fast, there isn’t enough information to create the perfect roadmap that works for every company. Throwing everything at it in this one grand promotional scheme introduces way too many variables, so many that nobody will be able to pinpoint why it didn’t work. Instead, they’ll throw the entire thing out the window – the baby with the bath water.

Again, this is easier said than done, so you might want to hire a professional just to get you started. Jakel Communications can help. Contact our Colorado public relations firm today!