What Questions To Ask When Developing a Social Media Strategy?
When looking to develop a social media strategy, the questions you can ask in order to answer them are many. We have gathered the most important ones below so you´ll get some answers to your question “What Questions To Ask When Developing a Social Media Strategy?”
1.What are your business goals?
That is, what are you hoping to achieve for your business by using social media? Note: These are not always about marketing and I usually seek goals that affect the bottom line, one way or another. Also, this is really a lead-in to learn about the client’s business, in general. What do they sell? How? Etc.
2. What is your sales cycle?
(Or what is your support process, if the goal is related to support, or other appropriate question) Understanding the cycle and touch points helps identify audience and opportunities.
3. What are reasonable social media goals, given the answers to the above.
These are specific goals. For example, the business goal might be “Make more sales on our website.” A social media goal might be, “Drive more traffic to our website through social channels.”
4. Who is your social audience?
5. What do you know about your audience? Where are they? What do they want and need?
6. What are your internal resources?
You need to know how many people and how much time can be devoted. How committed the client is. What departments they are from and what skills they bring. Also, money to build infrastructure such as a blog, etc.
7. What other digital efforts do you have going on?
Are they already doing some social media? Are they doing digital advertising?
8. Who is your competition and what are they doing?
9. How do you differentiate yourself from the competition?
10. What branding and messaging do you have/use?
11. What the objective of the social media initiative?
12. You need to go where your audience is. Who are they? What demographic? Which social media platforms do they use? What are their other interests?
13. How is your brand doing on social media? Do a detailed and unbiased audit.
14. What are you competitors doing? Audit them, and get ideas on what to do and what not to!
15. What is your brand personality? Do you have a story? Interests? Culture? Social Causes? All strategy and content needs to be in line with this.
16. What parameters will you use to measure social media performance?
They need to be time bound and realistic.
17. What is your budget? Are company stakeholders on board with the social media initiative?
18. What resources are at your disposal? Who is going to implement the strategy?
Accordingly, you will have to tweak the strategy, or allocate your own time for training & implementation.
19. How will you find out / listen to / monitor what your audience is saying?
This is essential to not just formulating strategy, but creating fresh & relevant content.
20. What other kinds of marketing is your company doing, apart from social media?
Strategy needs to be formulated so that all (online and offline) marketing initiatives complement one other.
Social media strategy should be an ineluctable part of the “communication plan”. This means that questions to be asked should be indifferent from those asked for the entire aspects of the communication functional activity.
Hopefully you´ve gotten the answers you were looking for regarding “What Questions To Ask When Developing a Social Media Strategy?”.
