Is your sourdough starter older than your social media strategy?

Are you a business owner with some time on your hands? Exhausted all the puzzles Kmart can produce and baked more sourdough than even a hungry horde of ducks could feast on? Why not use iso-life to review your social media strategy?

We all know that the day-to-day operational needs of a business or organisation usually end up taking priority over those “nice to have” plans but a little strategic thinking now may just save you time in the future. And if you’re one of those people who just thought “what social media strategy?” then read on because this is definitely for you.

What is a social media strategy?
A social media strategy is a summary of everything you plan to do and hope to achieve on social media. It guides your actions and lets you know whether you're succeeding or failing. It means every meme, every cat video and every post should be done with purpose.

Who should have a social media strategy?
If your business or organisation has a presence on any social platform that you use to promote your business or organisation, sell goods or services, share important stakeholder information, drive traffic to a website or generate leads, you should have a strategy that supports these objectives.

What should a social media strategy include?
It’s really up to you what sort of template you want to use but at its core, it needs to include your objectives (what you hope to achieve), your strategies (how are we going to get there) and the actions you need to take. You must also include measures otherwise so you can track your progress against your objectives. Other elements might include key messages, audience profiling and stakeholder mapping, environmental scan, competitor analysis, the list goes on.

How long should a social media strategy be?
Any strategic document should only be as long as is useful. What you don’t want is a thick and very pretty looking document that no one references. It needs to be as long as it needs to be to cover off on those elements above. If it’s not essential but contains useful background material, like a competitor analysis, consider appending it to your strategy for those who want more information.

How often should I review a social media strategy?
Reviews shouldn’t be time consuming, especially if you regularly monitor how your social media is tracking against your KPIs and objectives. However, you should be prepared to review your strategy if your business or organisation has undergone significant change. This could be a change in products, services or direction or an unforeseen change like what we’re experiencing at the moment with corona virus. Your strategy should be relevant to your current business needs which is why we recommend this as being a great time to get planning for relaunching your business post corona.

How do I get started?
The first thing you need to do is put down the sourdough starter. Stop procrastinating, open up your existing strategy and take a long hard look at your metrics and start asking some questions.

Have you been achieving your KPIs?

How are you tracking against your objectives?

Are all your objectives still relevant?

Anything that you answer no to needs tweaking, updating or deleting. You should also do an environmental scan – what platforms are your competitors using?

What new platforms have entered the market?

What new functionalities do your existing platforms have that you haven’t been using?

These all need to be considered and, if appropriate, written into your strategy. You’ll need to reset your KPIs and metrics and make sure everything you’re doing is working toward your objectives, existing or new.

And if this all sounds like hard work, call the friendly team at Spectrum and let us help you. We’re also partial to sourdough, just sayin’.