Strategic Social Media 101: Where to Begin
Continuing our recent run of a real wealth of guest articles, here comes another contribution from our old friend Beth Becker, who reminds us that in social media campaigning, we should to begin at the very beginning, which is a very good place to start. In the process she echoes a few points from the “Eight Simple Rules” chapter of Online Politics 101.
Strategic Social Media 101: Where to Begin
By Beth Becker
As social media has become more and more mainstream, our use of social media is becoming ever more sophisticated. Social media strategists like myself are spending more and more time wearing “data wonk” as our self-identity, and at times it can all be overwhelming. So as you begin to plan a social media campaign, what data do you need to take into consideration? Below is a set of questions I use to jumpstart my own planning, and the critical part is that the answers differ for every campaign I plan. And, the tools I use may differ depending on the goals.
1. What do I want to say?
After all, if you don’t have a message to convey why create a campaign to begin with?
2. To whom do I want to say it?
Who are the influencers you want to engage? This may well be the most important question in building your social media campaign. The answer will determine most of the answers to the remaining questions, and it’ll also focus your data-mining and targeting so that you’re not just throwing tweets/updates/pins into the aether and hoping they find an audience. Once you’ve determined the “who” in a broad sense, then you can dive into all kinds of targeting assistance tools to determine the specifics of who your audience is.
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