Social Media Strategy – building a firm foundation for your social media

“OK, I get that social media is massive. But where does it fit in, and is it the best fit for our business and objectives?“

Developing a social media presence is a big decision. You’re going to be committing time and money to it, and – unless you’re lucky enough to have endless budget at your disposal – there’ll be a priority call to be made.

If you don’t have a clear (and realistic!)  idea of what social media might do for you, it’s very difficult to know whether to keep it at the top of your list, or focus on other areas of your marketing and communications instead. It’s also hard to maintain momentum and measure results.

That’s where our Social Media Strategy and Sensecheck comes in.

Understand what social media means for your business

How does this sound? We’ll sit down with you, and help you evaluate the potential of social media for YOUR organisation.

We’ll explain the fundamental principles of how social media works (and we’re not talking about blinding you with hype of the “Millions of people use Twitter, so you’ll get your message to millions of people” variety), the options out there (what platforms should you be on and why,) and what would be involved in making it work for you.

The whole session is about helping you understand what social media can do, in the light of YOUR realities – your market sector, target audience, services or products, current marketing, budget and resource priorities – and also the reality of contemporary social media. The days of “build (post) it and they will come” are long gone!

What do you get from a Social Media Strategy Session?

Put simply: clarity, and a plan.

You’ll understand how the different social media sites differ from one another, what’s needed for success with each one, and how well they’d suit your business objectives.

You’ll know what impact a social media presence might have on your organisation, from the demands of regular copywriting to the kind of results you can expect.

You’ll analyse where your target audience might be on social media, and how difficult or easy it might be to get their attention.

You’ll see where social media complements or conflicts with your other marketing and communications activities.

So depending on the way the dicussion goes, you might come away with:

• A social media strategy: a clear understanding of how the various sites relate to your business and (target) customers; how you might go about recruiting an audience on social media; the kind of content you’ll need; what kind of resources, budget and activities would be required to make it work; where the challenges are, and what results you might expect;
• a list of the other priorities which need to be tackled first, plus some ideas about how social media might work for you in the future, or
• a solid justification for taking social media off of the “To Do” list completely.

An honest assessment

Many agencies will happily visit you for a couple of hours to talk about social media, at no charge. That couple of hours will be spent selling their services to you, because that’s what they’re in business to do. Advising you that social media might not be your best focus right now, or that 80% of your benefit is going to be from one platform, so maybe the others aren’t great value,  would be a terrible business model.

Our Social Media Sensecheck sessions provide an unbiased view, because you are paying for the session and we have no vested interest in your decision. We want our clients to get value from our experience of the reality of working with social media, and not waste money on poorly considered campaigns with no strategic basis.

How do Strategy sessions work?

The session usually takes around two hours, during which time we’ll work through all the relevant aspects of making social media effective.  If you have an existing marketing plan and / or social media accounts, you are welcome to supply these and we’ll review them prior to the session.

 Social Media Consultancy – helping you get the most from social media

A focused consultancy session can work wonders for companies or third sector organisations who’ve taken their first steps with social media but would like some experienced guidance to optimise their work, help develop a more advanced strategy, or run a specific campaign.

Questions that our social media consultants might help a client company with include:

• we’d like to add to our social media presence. How would YouTube / Pinterest / LinkedIn / Twitter etc, work for a business in our sector?
• How can we measure and track the impact of social media activity?
• How do we best integrate social media with a broader marketing or business plan?
• How do we improve the amount of engagement we achieve with customers or prospects?
• What kind of content might have most impact for our audience?
• What are the latest developments and platforms and how could we use them?
• How do we target a specific audience through social media?
• We’re not getting the reach that we used to. Could paid for social media campaigns help us, and if so how?