Celebrating Social Media Week!

With Social Media Week 2012 coming to a close we like to share a few thoughts on how we’re shaping our digital strategies today! We’ve addressed social media on Fit and Finish before but for this post we want to share three focal points to identify before putting together a digital strategy.

1- Know your audience:

Who is your audience? What hours of the day do you have their attention? What actions do they commonly take (retweeting, clicking links, commenting, asking questions, etc)? Which instances are they comfortable taking action?

We can start by examining your site’s analytics. We want to piece together the how, where, and when. Knowing how many hits on your site are unique, how many of those are returning and so on helps us see what conversations and topics resonate with your audience.

 

2- Understand their motives:

It’s not just enough to identify your audience and move on. It’s important that you balance that understanding with a clear idea of why. Your strategy will be most successful if you know what your audience is looking for in the relationship. Do they need information? Are they looking to buy something? Do they need assistance with an account?

Expert-led focus groups can help identify user motives and needs.  Identifying these desires will enable you to make specific decisions when putting your plan together including what type of content you will be providing.

Your content and how it should be delivered is another consideration which affects which social media networks you use. Are there questions being asked that will require a fast or slow response? Should it be private or a shared conversation? Should only a representative from your organization answer or could others?      

For example you’ve learned through research that users come to your site to seek advice on parenting. You’re not pushing urgent advice that needs instantaneous feedback so you can rule out live chat, but you may want to provide discussion boards with expert moderators alongside blogs on specific parenting topics.

 

3- Determining your Business Goals and Objectives for Social Media

You need to determine your goals in order to serve and meet user expectations (and your expectations as well). What returns are you looking for? You may be looking to increase online traffic to your site, if so, what sections of your site are you targeting? How can you benefit once the user gets there?

A key to goal setting is conducting a thorough analysis of your current capabilities and practices, as well as analysis of competitors/peers/best practitioners. This will help you benchmark and set milestones within your strategy.

It’s important to determine your goals so you can map out what areas in your social network you need to develop and maintain. It’s also necessary to put a method in place for measuring your performance. This will give you a tangible way to evaluate the execution of your strategy against your goals.

There are many other factors involved when putting together your digital strategy. These are just the tip of the ice berg. With these points in mind we can begin to decide what to invest in and how to ensure your strategy is effective and successful.