This is the 2nd blog post of a series I have written providing some help and advice to answer the question: How much will social media cost me? Make sure you read the full series – ‘Social Investment‘.

This is the important foundational part where you craft a plan at the beginning of your social media journey. In order to know what you are going to be ‘doing’ on a day to day basis – you need a roadmap of where you are hoping to end up. So, the old adage of ‘Fail to plan, plan to fail’ holds true here.

If you find you are active with social media, but you frequently lose heart, steam and the will-to-live – my guess is that you do not have an over-arching strategy or plan. Or…you do…and you haven’t revisited it often enough.

Who is involved in the strategy

I have carried out more than 60 to 70 strategy sessions (so far) in my time doing this work, and I still have to think about who should be involved in a session. This does vary from client to client – but here’s my advice on a general gist for you and your business…

Initial drafting and crafting of the over-arching strategy:

• Senior decision makers (or business owner)
• Agency consultant (if you have one)
• Managers (if you have this level…the ones who will directly manage the “doers”
• The “doers” – the people in-house who will be implementing the day-to-day

Ongoing review of strategy:

• Agency consultant (three and six month points)
• The “doers” (three and six month points)
• The senior decision makers (annual review)

Top tips for this task area:

1. Take your business objectives and drill them down to social media goals
2. Do intensive target customer exercises (we call them ‘avatars’ for short)
3. Flesh out your themes of content as per each avatar
4. Decide how you are going to measure success and establish some milestones
5. Allow for movement in the strategy (review every 3, 6 and 12 months)
6. Monitor the performance of your content (adjust where needed)
7. Ensure there is an integration with your marketing and communications strategy

Investment of time (and money):

For the initial strategy compilation I would strongly suggest engaging someone with experience in the social media and digital space to be a part of this. (This is usually the role I play for my clients – so find a consultant or an agency to support you with this element). This helps play devil’s advocate and challenge any “river of thinking” you may have (i.e. you only think in one way…because you’re close to your business and ‘know’ it all.)

My suggestion is to break this down into the following:

(a) Preparing the parties before the strategy sit-down session

Give them some points to think about and bring to the table. We have some set pre-session questions we give clients to talk to their teams about (if it’s a bigger company) or a list of questions for the people attending to research the answers to – before the session. (This saves a lot of nonsense discussion on the day and helps get the facts out on the table quicker.)

Time: approximately 2 to 3 hours (depends on size of business and stakeholders present).

(b) The face to face session

I highly suggest putting the decision makers and the “doers” in the room together. This can be tricky to facilitate (and I have done many of these) – so try to mitigate any practical issues before the day (in your prep questions and discussions). The idea is for all parties to actually see each other’s point of view. The “doers” will have the hands on skills and knowledge of what is possible and what is not. The decision makers will have the high level and will want to see how the ‘return’ is gained and achieves broader business objectives.

Time: around 3 to 4 hours (depends on size of business and stakeholders present). You may try to complete some high level target customer audience mapping which you can build on outside of the session.

(c ) Drafting the final strategy document and action plan

This is the time allocated to pull together everything gained from the face to face session and neatly put it into a format that is saved and can be pulled up again when review time comes around. Also – it’s important to breakdown whatever was discussed into a practical action plan – with priorities.

In order for the strategy to be achieved – certain frameworks will need to be in place; content be created; campaigns planned; other departments may need to be consulted; etc. Make this action plan simple, delegated to the right people and achievable. You need to also ensure that there are deadlines for the to-do’s and someone needs to be the whip – to ensure they get done.

A consultant would normally be a big part of pulling this all together for you and guiding you on the action list and priorities. They would however need to work closely with a nominated person in-house who will be the in-house whip. If the consultant works as an agency – they may well be able to get on with some of the framework to-do’s to get you up to speed quicker.

Time: allow for at least 3 hours end-to-end (distilling the information, building an action plan, communicating it all back to the relevant parties and setting up tasks etc into your project management system or to-do list software).

(d) Ongoing review of the strategy / plan

I’ve put this in to remind you to keep checking back to what you were hoping to achieve – so you can keep your strategy and expectations in check. Social media is notoriously a shifting landscape because it is heavily dependent on three big things that are outside of your control: (1) human behaviour, (2) social media platform development changes and (3) technology advancements (e.g. device adoption).

Make sure you build in time during the year to assess where you are in your plan and more importantly, that your strategy is indeed contributing to your business objectives.

In summary:

In terms of annual investment to the strategic element of your social media plan – I am suggesting the following:

12 hours for putting a strategy in place (prep, meeting, report drafting)
8 hours for reviewing the strategy (3, 6, 9 and 12 month points) – allow for a fuller report on the annual review which will more than likely have to be sent to the decision makers.

If it helps to put this in monetary terms – if you engaged an agency to help with this – that could equate to around £1500 to £2000 (for the year). If you value your time – this is not very much to keep your business on track for growth and success is it?

Would you like to have someone come in and help you with your strategy? I can do that! Read more here about our strategy session and/or book a free 30min conversation with me to see if we can work together (check my diary here).

Read more of our Strategy posts.

Looking for another social media topic?  Make sure you check our our full series of social media blog posts.