Social Media Strategy Worksheet

1. Objectives

a.What do you want to accomplish with social media?

  • Listening and learning
  • Building relationships
  • Building awareness of issue
  • Improving reputation of organization
  • Motivating content generation by supporters
  • Increasing relevant visitor traffic/page rankings
  • Increasing perceptions of social norms
  • Social support
  • Taking action (behavior change)
  • Other:

b.Now, restate your objective(s) so they are “SMART” – specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-based.

c.Describe how your social media objective supports or links to a goal in your program’s overall marketing strategy.

2. Target Audience

a.Who must you reach with your social media efforts to meet your objective? Why this target group?

b.Is this a target group identified in your program’s marketing strategy?

c.What do they know or believe about your organization or issue? What will resonate with them?

d.What key points do you want to make with your audience?

e.What social media tools are they currently using? If they congregate in certain online locales, what are they talking about in relation to your brand/goals/issues/competitors? Describe based on direct observation, primary research, or secondary research.

f.What additional research do you need to do to learn about your target audience’s online social behavior or understanding/perceptions about your organization or issues?

  1. Integration

a.How will your social media strategy support and enhance your Internet strategy?

Internet Strategy Component / How Does Social Strategy Support
Email
Web Site
Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Advertising

b.Is there an “offline” component that you need to support/connect?

4. Capacity

a.Who will implement your organization’s social media strategy?

b.How many hours per week can you collectively devote to your strategy?

c.Do you need any outside expertise to help implement your strategy?

d.Will your content updates depend on any other resource or person?
(Do they know your intentions?)

5. Tools and Tactics

a.What tactics and tools best support your objectives and match your targeted audience?

Tactics / Tool Examples / Implementation Ideas
Listen / Google Alerts, RSS readers, Twitter Search
Converse / Blog, comments, Twitter
Tell Your Story / Blogs, Twitter, video/photo sharing, podcasts
Help Supporters Tell Your Story / User generated content, contests, social network apps, widgets
Generate Buzz / Social news (eg Digg), StumbleUpon, Twitter, FriendFeed, blogger outreach
Build Community / Social networks, Twitter, tagging, gaming/virtual worlds
Collaborate/Collect Information / Wikis, social bookmarking, tagging

b.Now, take a second look at what you are planning. What tactics and tools do you have the capacity to implement?

c.Are you prepared to allow additional time for researching new social media tools or changing tools?

6. Measurement

  1. What hard data points or metrics will you use to track your objectives? How often will you track? Do you have the systems and tools set up to track efficiently?

Measurable Objective / Before / During / After

b.What questions will you ask to generate insights?

c.What qualitative data will you take into consideration to generate insights or help you improve what your social media strategy?

7. Experiment

a.What small piece can you implement first as a pilot?

b.Aside from the metrics described above, how will you track the implementation so you can learn from it?

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