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Some may see that there is no need for a social media strategy definition. Surely it’s obvious what it is!
Recently the marriage of SEO and social media has dazzled marketers with the consequential rise in content marketing. As a result, the opportunities to use social media more strategically have taken second place or been lost.
There are three compelling reasons for using social media:
Marketing – understanding customers, developing brand awareness and a fit to customer acquisition.
Employee Engagement – developing company culture, improving internal collaboration and recruiting talent.
Collaboration – creating social spaces to collaborate with partners, suppliers and customers.
Unifying how social media fits in the overall business strategy is crucial to building and growing a business. Social media plays an unusual role in that it fuses together the building of a brand internally and externally. Internally it forms part of ‘the way we do business’, which in itself forms and establishes the culture of a business. Externally, it is not only the outward communications mix but the reactions and opinions to this communication both good or bad: the conversations that determine brand reputation.
As a discipline, it crosses HR (recruitment), sales, marketing, customer service, supplier and partner relationships and sets the tone of the culture within the business.
The question “What is strategy?” has ignited hours of debate amongst academics and management thinkers alike. This perhaps is a good indicator of why there is no one single definition of strategy and why businesses struggle with it.
SO producing a definition then for what is a social media strategy promises to be no less controversial.
Goals – the aims of the business, its purpose and what it wants to achieve.
Strategy – defines how you will achieve your goals: the plan.
Objectives – are the specific details and accompanying measures (SMART)
Tactics – tactics are specific actions.
I doubt if there is one definition of a social media strategy that everyone could agree with.
The goal of this blog is to get businesses to look at the main principles of social media, step back from the hype (which is mostly marketing focused) and revisit what it could do to help fuel growth. In particular, it is how businesses can collaborate together at a local level that has the potential for innovation. Together businesses can form beneficial alliances that could fulfil requirements that normally would go to larger businesses.
We are now witnessing the second phase of social media where marketplaces facilitate people sharing resources and work
Chuck Reynolds
Contributor
