Developing a Digital strategy 005 – Practicalities, Questions to ask

Questions to ask when developing a Social Media strategy

1 What are you looking to achieve?

Are you looking to achieve more traffic, unique page views, leads, direct sales, greater brand awareness, conversions, brand engagement, other? How is spending time (=money) on social media going to provide better return for what you are doing?

2  What kind of social media?

Where is your audience online? Where are you going to advertise your presence?  Where are your competitors?  Have they got it right? This may be hard to answer initially until you try out different sites. Categories to think about include linking sites, SEO sites, social networking sites, professional networking sites, and industry specific social networking communities.

3 Is brand control and limited use of Social Media an issue?

Participation in social media is social and done by individuals on behalf of companies as well as individuals often having their own personal online presence. In many instances individual interaction is better than a corporate interaction.  How will this be managed?  What happens when the individual leaves?  Where are the boundaries between personal and work online interactions?

4 How can participation be encouraged?

What will make your audience want to interact with you – information, offers, news, being part of a respected site, being part of the ‘in’-crowd….

5 Resourcing of maintaining Social Media

Who will maintain your social media presence? Will this be done in addition to employees regular jobs, by the marketing department, by a dedicated person? How much time will be allocated? If no additional resourcing is going to given in terms of staff or time, what be done less of?

6 How will you build your Link Investment?

Will link investment be built by quantity of links or by looking to link to quality sites in your subject area or a mixture of both?

7 Will you use advertising to grow traffic?
Use of Advertising can increase traffic to your site, but may not be recommended depending on the type of organization and product.

8  How will you measure your sucess?
How will views, followers, comments, increased traffic, revenue be measured. How will you measure the impact of your SM Strategy, and at what point do you decide a particular strategy is not working?

9 How does the Social Media SEO strategy integrate with the department’s existing marketing strategy and the Companies PR policy overall?
Some existing social media strategies are loosely defined others are very specific in what can be done.  Should existing marketing strategies be supportive or integrated into new social media strategies or done separately?

These questions are not easy to answer, and even then the answers may change in the future.  Even if you can’t answer all of them, they will help shape the direction of your digital strategy.  If you are thinking of hiring a social media person, Altitude Branding have an excellent post on ‘Hiring for Social Media: what I’d look for’

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