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Developing a social media strategy

Gemma Wentgemmawent.com

Copyright © Red Cube Marketingwww.redcubemarketing.com

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Written by Gemma Went, the social media strategy series looks at each stage of the process, giving the tools and tips that enable you to produce a robust strategy for yourself.

Gemma gives you a step-by-step guide, from getting buy-in at the start to ongoing management, in an easy to follow, straightforward style. Well that’s our thing you see: no fluff, no jargon and lots of common sense.

We’ve referenced a few social media platforms and sites in this ebook. However, things progress very quickly in social media land, so if any of these are out of date by the time you read this, we’re sorry. If you have the time, or inclination, do drop us an email to let us know.

Hello

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Is it right for your business?Getting buy inGoals and objectivesFinding your audiencesDeveloping tacticsMeasurementThe content planDefining your resourcesGuidelines and trainingOngoing managementGetting in touch

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Social media has been big news for a while now. You can’t read a trade mag, newspaper, business blog or anything else connected with business without tripping over some evangelical social media bod ushering you onto the social media train (and I do realise I’m one of them). Yes social media is one of the most effective communications tools we’ve had at our disposal for a long time. Yes it’s a huge shift in how we engage with people. And yes, it can deliver great results. However, it’s not necessarily right for every business.

There are a number of considerations to think about before you climb aboard. Here’s a checklist that will help you to understand a little more about what’s involved and whether it’s right for you.

Is social media appropriate for your line of business?Are your customers, clients and the people you want to connect with using social media? Are your competitors active in this space? Have you searched to see if people are already having conversations about your business, your industry niche or even your brand? If the answer is yes, then it could be a very useful tool for you. There are some great free tools you can use to find what conversations are happening now. Social Mention is a tool that searches for brand names or keywords mentioned across the web. Twitter search is a nifty little tool that offers a variety of ways to search for brand names or keywords on Twitter. Google Blog Search does as the name suggests, let’s you search across the blogosphere. And of course, don’t forget good old Google Alerts, which allows you to set up alerts that are emailed to you when a keyword is mentioned. These are just a few examples, there are many more.

Is it right fo

r you?

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Do you have buy in from the boss?So you’re clear social media can help your business. Does the board/the C suite/the boss feel the same? If not you could be heading for an uphill battle. Social media can take a lot of time and resources, resources that can quickly be taken away if the boss doesn’t see the true value. Make life easier for yourself by building a business case that will get full, ongoing support from the start. I’ll go into more detail on this later.

Do you have the resources for it?Do you have someone that can dedicate ongoing time to social media? Are you able to restructure a member of staff’s job description to allow for it? Can you commit to this time and not take this person away from their social media activities when it gets busy? Remember, you can’t open the door to social media and close it when workload increases. If the answer is yes to these, then you do. If not, you may want to think about who you can use for this, either externally or internally.

Do you have the time for it?Social media really is a marathon not a sprint, so don’t expect results overnight. Are you prepared to invest the time with little output at the beginning? Are you prepared to put in the groundwork even when you won’t see the return on your investment straight away? Do you have the patience for it? If so, you’ll reap the rewards in the long run.

Is it right fo

r you?

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Is it right fo

r you?

Is it a priority for you?Do you have a quality, fully optimised website you can direct people to from your social media profiles or blog? Or is your website full of business speak that doesn’t engage your audience? Do you have other marketing or pr priorities to deal with first? Make sure your house is in order, it will be easier to integrate social media with your other activities if you do.

Do you know what your objectives are?Do you know, and understand, what you want to achieve with social media? Are you clear what it can do for you and what it can’t? Have you tied this into your business plan? You need to be certain of your goals before you start, otherwise you’ll waste a lot of time and effort on something that isn’t targeted to your specific needs.

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So you’ve done you’re research and decided that social media is right for your business. The next step is convincing the Boss/C Suite/Board that the time and budget investment will help you to achieve the results they want. This, my friends, is the tricky part. Your boss will have read countless articles questioning the ROI of Social Media. It’s likely they’ll have assumed that it’s only for the youth or that it’s irrelevant to their business. Your job is to prove it’s worth and get full, ongoing support, resources and budget. Social media is more than just a ‘campaign’, it’s a long term commitment that needs ongoing support and to get this kind of commitment you need a strong business case.

Aligning the business case with your businessFirst things first, get hold of the business plan and marketing strategy. Have a look at the objectives and work out which can be achieved by using social media. Be realistic here, social media isn’t the answer to everything, so pick out those that are achievable. Then do your homework. Find examples of other businesses (preferably within your sector) that have achieved those objectives. Show how achievable it is, show how it can be measured, show an idea of realistic timescales.

Who’s using it?Think about your stakeholders. These can be customers, clients, suppliers, partners, employees, journalists, peers, investors and anyone else your business needs to connects with. Segment these and then find where they are online. What social media platforms are they using? Is there a large number using Facebook? Twitter? Linked In? a niche social networking site? Can you find any stats showing usage? You need to prove that the people you need to connect with are using social media. If you can find case studies that show results of how others have engaged with these audiences, use them.

Getting

buy-in

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Competitive analysisFind out which platforms your competitors are using. Do they have any success stories or case studies? Do they appear to be reaping other rewards through using social media (has their press coverage increased? has brand awareness grown? are they directly engaging with prospects online? are they speaking regularly at events?). If so, these are great ways of showing how social media can work. But, don’t be put off if you can’t find many using social media. It could be that take-up in your industry is slow, which means you could be the first.

Brand reputation managementFinally, and perhaps the piéce de résistance to those brands that are regularly talked about, find what’s being said about you online. Show what people truly think of your brand using the free tools such as Social Mention and Twitter Search. This really can make people sit up, take notice and realise they need to be part of that conversation.a

How will you do it?So, we’ve proven that social media is a relevant activity for your business and the board is, ahem, onboard. Now you need to make them understand what’s involved and how it will be managed. Take them through the next steps, who will do it and timings. These steps will consist of:

� Identifying goals and objectives � Finding your audiences � Developing tactics � Metrics and measurement � The content plan � Defining resources � Guidelines and training � Ongoing management and beyond

Getting

buy-in

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Getting

buy-in

Then provide them with budget requirements – do you need to hire an external consultant? Do you need external training? Do you need extra salaries (or portions of salaries)? Also provide them with the timings. Be realistic with both of these, they need the cold hard facts not hype.

If you think budget is going to be a sticking point, review your current communciations activities. Work out what’s working and what’s not. Suggest replacing those activities that aren’t producing results with a social media strategy and reassign the budget. Similarly, if finding extra resource is an issue, review job descriptions and work out what responsibilities can be replaced.

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The next step is to identify your goals and objectives. I’ve seen these two confused, so for the sake of clarification here’s my definition: Goals are general, wider intentions whereas objectives are precise, measurable steps that help you to achieve your goals.

Identifying your objectives for social media is essential. If you have no specific reasons for using it, you’ll spend a lot of time having very enjoyable conversations, but these will achieve nothing. You’ll have no results to show how it’s working for you and no justification for the time and budget spent on it. Before long the powers that be will, naturally, question the investment and the activity. And nobody wants that.

So start with your business plan and marketing strategy. What overall business goals do you need to meet? Break these down and think about whether social media can help you meet them. Be realistic and identify those goals you can achieve. If you have a marketing strategy (and if not, why not?) go through those goals and objectives and pull out those that social media can help you to achieve. The key here is to align your social media objectives with your business goals to ensure you can achieve what you need to.

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als and o

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There is a wide range of objectives social media can help you with and I’ve listed an example of these below. Obviously this list may not be right for your business and you won’t know which objectives are right until you’ve analysed the business plan and/or marketing strategy, but it gives you a good idea of the types of things you can achieve by using social media.

� Building awareness � Establishing thought leadership � Launching new products or services � Increasing reach (either geographically or by sector) � Generating leads � Increasing sales � Research and insight (understanding how to improve your product or

service) � Saving costs (eg reducing recruitment costs) � Building your community � Creating word of mouth activity � Improving public relations activity � Driving traffic to a website or blog � Improving SEO � Improving customer/client relations � Providing customer/client service � Competitive analysis

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Go

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Now I wouldn’t suggest including all of these. You’ll be setting yourself up for a fall if you do as there are far too many to manage. Instead pick out the key objectives you can achieve and don’t forget to apply the SMART rule: all objectives should be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Timely. You’ll need to apply realistic timeframes to each one and identify the metrics that will allow you to measure whether you’re achieving what you set out to.

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Now you need to think about those target audiences (aka people) you need to connect with to help you to achieve what you need to. You probably think you already know who these people are. It’s the same ones you’ve been targeting for years right? Not necessarily. Spend time thinking about who you need to connect and engage with and see past the obvious. Think about who’s interested in your product or service? Is there anything unique that could appeal to a certain audience? Then think about the next level, who those people might be associated with. Word of mouth is a powerful thing and it’s rife amongst social media folk, so connecting with those that are connected to your target audiences can be worthwhile.

Then think about who these people are, which industries they work in, what they like, what they read, what motivates them, age ranges, personality traits, where they hang out, technical know-how, how likely they are to use social media. Really do your research and segment your audiences. You may uncover some less obvious people that could be great for you. Keep a record of this, a simple spreadsheet will do, and as your experience of using social media grows, review and update, adding others as necessary.

Also identify your key influencers. These could be people that stand out within your communities, people that others listen to, people that create action (tip: this doesn’t necessarily mean those people with thousands of Twitter followers, true influence is far more than simply big numbers). They could be peers, journalists, thought leaders or other stakeholders.

Finding

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People with game changing opinion and ideas. People who challenge the norm. Or simply people that talk sense. The types of audiences you could be looking for include:

� Current clients or customers � Potential clients or customers � Associates of current/potential clients or customers � Journalists and editors � Bloggers � Suppliers � Affiliate businesses � Thought leaders

If you don’t know where the people you want to connect with are, make the most of the various free monitoring tools to track who is talking about the keywords associated with your business: Google Analytics, Social Mention, Technorati, Addictomatic and Board Reader, to name a few, can help. This should highlight who has a voice in these subject areas.

Once you’ve profiled the people you want to connect with, you need to find them. This is an ongoing process and takes a little time to begin with, so set some time aside to research where these people are. This will give you a good idea of which social platforms you should have a presence on, so keep your mind open to niche sites as well as the big guns. The research mentioned above will already have given you a good idea of where these people are, so record popular sites from that. There are a bunch of tools you can use to help you find them on the main social networks.

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How to find people on Twitter � Search.twitter.com is a favourite. It has a wide criteria range, including

location (handy for local businesses). Also use this tool to find the key influencers in your industry and browse their follower/following lists. You could find some great people to connect with there.

� Twitterrel lets you find people talking about related topics. � Twellow is the Twitter equivalent of the Yellow Pages. A directory

sorted by occupation. Handy. � Just Tweet It a directory sorted by interest. � WeFollow is a directory that organises people by hashtags. � Also pay attention to hashtags being used for events, you could find

some great people there.

There are a few search tools for Twitter and some of these double up on features, so have a play around and see which suit your needs.

Finding

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Finding

your aud

iencesHow to find people on Linked InThere aren’t so many tools to find people on Linked In as there are on Twitter, but there are a few options to search for the right people to connect with.

� Search for the names of those people you’ve already identified by name using Linked In’s search box. Also make the most of the advanced search feature.

� You can also use this search box to search for keywords that will be included in profiles. Make the most of using OR or AND in these searches to include a few keywords (OR allows you to look for any one of those terms in the profile, AND allows you to look for a number of words).

� You can also search for people using their email addresses. � Join groups that fit with your interests or industry. Once you’ve been

accepted as a member, browse the member lists and find people with shared interests.

� Use the Questions and Answer function to start a conversation around your key subject area. You’ll find those people interested will respond to you, after which you can connect with them.

You can’t simply choose to connect with people on Linked In as you can with Twitter. They need to give their approval (which I’m a fan of), so if they’re connected to you through someone you’re connected to, request to be introduced to them.

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Finding

your aud

iencesHow to find people on FacebookAgain, it’s not as easy to find people as it is on Twitter, but try these tips:

� Use the find people tool by popping your email address in. It finds all those people in your address book that are using Facebook.

� Search for fan pages in your subject area and browse other fans there. � Once you’ve connected with some key influencers, browse their

friends and connect with people that way (aka piggy backing your friends friends).

� When using the search function, filter your results to drill down to the people you’re looking for.

� Use the search for workmates function to find people affiliated with companies.

� Keep an eye on the suggestions that pop up on your news stream.

As I mentioned, this can take a little time, particularly when you first start using social media, but it’s worth the time and effort. It’s not a ‘one time’ job either, set a reminder to review your connections regularly to keep it fresh and to ensure you’re not missing anyone crucial to your business.

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Develo

ping

tacticsPlease note, there’s been no Twitter profile or Facebook Page in site so far. This is important as these activities are tactics NOT strategies, something often misunderstood.

Your tactics will be based on the work done so far in the strategy development. Take a look at your goals and objectives, get a good feel for them and what they mean. Then have a look at the research you’ve done on your audiences, think about where they are online, how they interact, what sort of things do they respond well to? do they like creative social media campaigns (virals, competitions etc) or do they simply respond well to conversation and advice? (tip: most DON’T respond well to overt selling). Spend a little time thinking about this and capture any creative ideas you have about what they like.

If you did a competitive analysis while you were getting buy in, use this research to understand how your competitors are using social media. If you didn’t you’ll need to do this. Have a look at those doing a good job, those that look like they’re getting some good results (a decent sized, relevant community that interacts with and/or signs of influence – so creating action, having content shared, mentions etc). Obviously you don’t want to copy what they’re doing, standing out is so much better, but it will give you a good idea of what’s working well.

We’ll be covering resources in more detail later, but at this point have a think about what resources you have to work on this. Do you have anybody that can dedicate their time to it? Are there a few people you can use? Once you have a good idea of what resource is available, and how much time they’ll have, keep this in mind so that you don’t develop resource hungry tactics you’ll be unable to action.

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Develo

ping

tacticsNext, take your objectives in turn and create tactics to help you achieve them, with all of the above research in mind. Here is an example:

Objective: Build brand awareness

Now this is a very general objective, but a common one (which is why I’ve picked it). You could make this more specific if you like: build awareness in a certain region, for a specific service, in a certain sector. Better still attach some numbers to it to help with measurement: Grow brand awareness of xxxx service and increase web enquiries for that service by 10%. The more specific the better.

Your tactics for this could include:

� Launch a Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn profile (as appropriate) and connect with the target audiences (or people, as I prefer to call them).

� Launch a blog showcasing relevant knowledge for the region, service area, sector etc

� Build a presence on niche networking sites relevant to your objectives (these would have already been identified when you researched where your audiences are online).

� Research and identify relevant blogs for guest blogging opportunities. � Research and identify relevant blogs and engage in discussions. � Create a hashtag around your specialist area and drive the conversation.

This could also be a hashtag around a regular Twitter chat. � Develop a competition or creative word of mouth campaign across

relevant platforms to raise awareness of the brand

These are just a few examples, but you get the idea. For each objective there could be a range of tactics that will help you to meet them. You will also need to attach metrics to each to ensure you can measure the effectiveness against what you’re trying to achieve, but we’ll cover that next.

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Develo

ping

tacticsGo through each objective you’ve already identified and list tactics. Then refine this list with your resources in mind (be realistic here, if not you could be setting yourself an unachievable workload).

Once you have your proposed list of tactics, think about who else in your organisation should have sight of this and bring them together to discuss any possible issues. For example, the IT department may need to deal with restrictions to social networking sites, the legal department may need to be involved in the guidelines or policy, the customer services department may need to use the social networking sites as a channel to deal with customer problems, the sales department may want to understand where possible leads are coming from. This helps to refine your strategy and ensure it fits with the rest of the business. They could come up with a few ideas you haven’t thought of and, more importantly, any potential issues that need to be ironed out before you move on to the next stage.

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Measurem

entOnce you’ve developed the social media tactics, you need to set the metrics to understand if those objectives are being met. Now this isn’t an exact science as much of this activity relies on word of mouth, which has always been hard to pin down. Digital activity has made it much easier to get a handle on metrics and understand how the tactics are working.

Start by listing your objectives identified earlier on in the strategy. For each one, think about what success would look like. What would happen if things went to plan and you achieved what you set out to? Would your blog subscribers/fans/followers increase? Would your sales increase? Would your website traffic increase? Would you get approached by journalists more? The key here is to measure what is directly connected to what you’re trying to achieve. Simply looking at followers or fans doesn’t cut it for all objectives, so pick what works for each.

If your objective is to raise brand awareness then things like number of fans, followers, subscribers, engagement, mentions, content shared can give you an accurate indication of how much your brand awareness is growing over a period of time. However, if your objective is to generate business leads or grow sales, these metrics mean diddly squat. Instead you’ll need to track traffic from your social media activities to your website and measure conversions, track where email or phone enquiries are generated from, record how many opportunities you identified through social media are converted. What we want to know here is how much fee income or sales has been generated by social media activity, so think about how you can measure that.

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It’s worth spending some time matching the right metrics to the right objective. Think about the paths your customers or clients take to get to the end goal, this could throw up some useful metrics for you to measure along that path. A few examples are listed below, note not all of them are digital. Don’t overlook the offline stuff, this is just as important.

� Twitter followers, RTs, mentions, lists � Facebook fans, likes, comments, shared content � Linked In connections, responses to questions, comments within

group discussions, recommendations etc � You Tube/Flickr etc views, comments, shared content � Blog visits, subscriptions, comments, shared content � Mentions, sentiment (and changes in sentiment) � Emailer, newsletter sign ups � Links clicked (for example to an offer on your website that’s linked

from your blog, social networking site, email signatures etc) � Website traffic, particularly to specific actions (email sign up, offers,

landing pages etc) � Search traffic, both organic and paid � Website or blog page rank, inbound links etc � Approaches to guest blog or write articles in the trade press � Approaches to speak at events � Increase in sales (either track where these came from if they’re

converted through your ecommerce site or record manually where your sales were generated from. I have a spreadsheet that shows where each prospect and converted client was generated from. But you’re doing this already right?)

Measurem

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� Track relationships. What’s happening to the people you’re connecting with on Twitter, Facebook, Linked In, the blog etc. Are you moving them to your CRM system? Are you tracking how often you’re connecting with them? Are you keeping an eye on how these relationships progress?

� Increase in footfall to your shop/restaurant/bar. Do you know how many people visit? Where did they come from? If you run campaigns with promotion codes this can give you some great data.

� And while on the subject of location based businesses, are you tracking Foursquare, Gowalla and other location based apps? Check ins, tips, how many people are making the most of your offers through these apps (if you’re running them of course) are all useful metrics.

As I mentioned earlier, this isn’t an exact science. People can take a variety of routes to get to the end goal, but this will give you a good indication of how things are working for you. Once you’ve set the metrics for each objective, pop them on a simple spreadsheet and record where you are now so you have a benchmark. I track these monthly to allow me to understand how things are working, but you can do it more often if your tactics are time critical.

Once you’ve collected some decent data over a few months, you can start to spot patterns and make assumptions about cause and effect. This can help you to improve and refine your activities and help you get what you need out of them. It also means you can spot those activities that aren’t producing the results you need and stop them in favour of putting more effort into the stuff that is working.

Measurem

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A good content plan can supercharge activities and make sure you publish relevant content across the web. When considering content creation, never forget the goals and objectives that should guide your thinking around suitable topics. For example, if you need to raise awareness or become a thought leader in a particular service area/industry/product type, this should become a key topic area for which you will need to create content demonstrating your expertise.

Break your goals and objectives into a range of core topics then hold a creative brainstorm with your team, or you can do this alone. The aim is to develop a range of subject areas for each topic. Always keep your audiences in mind when doing this, think about what they will genuinely be interested in and don’t fall into the trap of writing for yourself or your peers.

Once you’ve generated ideas for content topics, you can start thinking about the various channels you will use it on and how you will use it:

� Blog: develop an editorial calendar, assigning topics to blog posts and set deadlines

� Linked In: create conversation around key topics in the Group areas and add links to blog posts

� Guest posts: approach other blogs and offer your content as a one off or as a regular contributor

� Newsletter: not everyone will read your blog, so repurpose blog content here

� Twitter and Facebook: share blog posts and start discussions around your topics

� Ebooks: if you generate a lot of content on a particular topic, create an ebook that you can offer on the website or blog (just like we did with this)

The co

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Curating content across multiple digital channels ensures the best results. But do more than simply cut and paste, each channel should have a tailored version to fit.

To ensure your content plan is fresh, stay up to date with the latest buzz around your topics by:

� Subscribing to relevant blogs through RSS Readers (Google Reader is still my favourite)

� Subscribe to newsletters � Set up Twitter searches around your topics or create a list of thought

leaders to keep an eye on � Find where your audiences are hanging out in places like Linked In

groups or forums and listen to what they’re interested in � Use Google Alerts

Before you start to write, agree the style and tone of voice you want to use that either fits with your personality or your business. And if you have a search engine optimisation strategy, become familiar with your keywords and include them (naturally) in all content (and if you don’t have an SEO strategy, you need one).

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The co

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Content creation is an ongoing process and it’s easy to run out of steam. So if you lose inspiration along the way, try a few of these ideas:

� Make the most of other media: share a slideshare presentation, a great video you uncover, infographics and other interesting gems you find

� Add your own presentations to slideshare and share � Develop regular features, such as monthly or weekly roundups and

reviews etc � Publish interviews with interesting and relevant people � Invite guest bloggers to add a fresh perspective to your content � Invite customers or clients to ask questions, either on the blog,

Facebook, Twitter or Linked In and answer them on your blog � If you attend an industry event, write a post event review � Create ‘how to’ lists

Finally, you need to ensure your content makes people ‘want’ to read it. Here are a few tips:

� Create attention grabbing headlines � Keep it relevant, ‘on topic’ and make sure all content passes the ‘so

what’ test � Make it conversational rather than broadcast (ask questions, invite

comments) � Don’t agonise over spelling and grammar, tone of voice is far more

important � Keep it short and punchy, people consume a great deal of content

online and have less time for longer pieces � Embrace controversy, people love a good debate

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Once you’ve decided which activities to add to the mix, you’ll need the staff to resource it. And it’s not automatically the job of the intern or graduate because they ‘get it’, unless they’ve had the right training and will have ongoing management to ensure they’re fully equipped to do a good job for you, of course.

Commit resource to itSocial media is an ongoing activity that needs commitment, so be sure to give it what it deserves from the start. Break down the activities into specifics and estimate how much time each will take. The initial setup can take a fair amount of time, so don’t overlook this. You’ll need things like Twitter background design, avatar design, good bio profiles etc. These don’t take up a great deal of time, but if you don’t have the right resource in house, you’ll need to outsource it to ensure your online presence is on brand.

Think about the ongoing work. How many social networking sites will you be using? Are you launching a blog? If so, how often have you decided to publish posts? Have you developed a content plan that includes things like guest blogging? If so, how often will you write and publish these?

Who’s best placed to work on it?Think about who is best placed work on this for you. Do you already have marketing/pr/sales/customer service/hr teams? If so, each of them will need a foot in the social media camp. Don’t be fooled into thinking this is just a job for the comms team, social media crosses over most departments. In fact once you’ve got a good handle on how it works for your business, you may well see the benefit of making it an employee wide activity and get everyone in on the act.

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If you have a few teams, think about which should work on this and get these teams together to discuss it. You may find a few volunteers keen to get onboard from the start, which is half the battle. Those that won’t be actively engaged in your social media activity will still need to know of your plans as it could affect what they’re doing offline. Remember, your customers or clients don’t see you as being either offline or online. They just see your brand, so make sure your teams fully understand the plan and can help you integrate all activity.

If your business is an SME with limited resource, this still applies to you. Who do you have in your team that can work on this? Again, talk to them about your social media strategy and see if natural social stars volunteer. If not, it may well fall to the person that handles your communications activities for now.

Fitting it all inIf your staff are already overworked, you may be wondering how on earth to fit this new activity in. The simplest way of handling this is to review current workload and review the results. For example, if you’re already measuring your marketing activity you will be able to work out which activities are performing well and which aren’t. Remove those tasks that aren’t delivering and replace them with your new social media activity.

It may mean juggling a few things and rearranging a few job descriptions, but doing it this ways shows your commitment to the activity and will allow your staff the time to work on it and do well.

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The right guidelines and training will allow your team to do a good job. Now, don’t think this needs to be a big nasty rule book. Your goal here is to provide the tools and knowledge they need to be able to achieve your social media strategy.

GuidelinesYour guidelines should cover:

� Your objectives. Be clear why you’re using social and how it will be measured so the team understand what they need to achieve and what their KPI’s will be. The training can cover the full strategy, but I find it useful to add the objectives in the guidelines as a reminder.

� Who the social media team is. As social impacts many areas of the business, this should also include those behind the scenes as well as those on the frontline, like IT, Legal, HR etc.

� Which social activity you’ve defined in the plan, how it will be used and how much time is acceptable to spend on it.

� Who owns the profiles, if your team is Tweeting from their own accounts, for example, do they own those accounts or does the company? Be clear with this from the start as things could get tricky if they leave.

� Have a plan for what happens to profiles once people leave. � What content should be shared through social media. Be descriptive

here as this is important. Make it clear what content is confidential and what isn’t. Also be clear what language is acceptable. If you have brand/messaging guidelines it would be a good idea to share these so that the team fully understand your positioning.

� If the members of your social team have different roles, be clear what they are and what’s expected of them.

� What to do if things go wrong. List ALL possible risk scenarios and how they should be handled to make it clear (and of course make sure you have the process in place to deal with these if they happen).

Make the guidelines concise, easy to read and accessible.

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TrainingOnce the guidelines are done, you’re ready to train the team. If you feel confident doing this yourself great, if not get someone in to help you. The training is key as it gives your team the knowledge they need and empowers them to use social media confidently. The training should cover:

� The social media strategy. Make sure everyone involved understands your objectives, how they will be measured, who your target audiences are, what content you will be sharing and everything else in-between. You’re after understanding and full buy-in here so ensure it’s easy to grasp and free of jargon. Also include how the team will be reviewed and how often.

� Your guidelines. Again, you want full understanding and buy in from the team.

� If their experience of social media is limited, help them by including an introduction to ensure they understand what it is and how it works.

� Training on each activity and how it will be run. Include everything here, from profile set up and bio writing to how to use each tool in your plan. Make sure you include all the tips and tricks to make it easier to manage and if you’ve chosen tools like Cotweet, Hootsuite, Tweetdeck etc, include a full explanation on these.

� Spend a little time on the content as this is often a sticking point. Show them how to find the right content to share, how to produce content, even how to write if need be.

� How they should engage through the various channels and deal with things like negative blog comments.

� Who is there to help them if they get stuck. This is important, your team should feel fully supported should things go wrong. You could provide ongoing coaching if that’s a requirement.

If you feel it’s necessary, arrange a few sessions over a period of time to give them the chance to feedback and discuss their findings.

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Finally, you need to think about who will ultimately be responsible for the activity and how will they keep an eye on progress to ensure objectives are met? The same person will need to ensure the correct measurement is taken and analysed to ensure you’re achieving what you set out to. I find monthly reviews of the strategic objectives against actual activity can help you alongside regular monitoring of your measurement system. This allows you to see what’s working and what isn’t, allowing you to tweak activity to ensure optimum performance.

It’s also worth keeping your finger on the pulse of technological developments. New tools are being introduced all the time and existing ones updated even more so, which can make your current ways of doing things out of date before you can say Twitter API, so it’s worth keeping abreast of how things progress to ensure you make the most of them. Your team should be able to help you with this as they’ll be at the frontline.

Keep your monitoring system up to date. You may need to listen out for new keywords or brands as things progress, so keep your eye on this. And never forget to listen to your community and learn from them, they’re a valuable asset to your business.

Once you get to grips with your social media activity, be open to opportunities that come your way. Yes the strategy will help you to achieve what you set out to and keep you aligned with the overall business plan, but some unplanned doors often open through social media, so be open to what can come your way, you could be surprised.

Finally, once you and your team are comfortable with your social media activity, don’t be afraid to be creative with it. Come up with creative campaigns that can raise awareness and engage further with your community. Have fun with it, there are so many possibilities within the various platforms, so see what you can come up with.

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We hope this has helped you to understand how to make social media work for you. If you need further help with social media, marketing or pr, get in touch.

You can connect with Gemma in a variety of places:

gemmawent@gmail.comtwitter.com/gemmawentlinkedin.com/in/gemmawentgplus.t0/gemmawentgemmawent.com