Your first question, of course, may be why on earth should I write a Social Media Strategy in the first place?? I mean, you just get on with it surely! But, as with all things when you are running your own business, if you start doing some marketing (because that IS what you are doing by being on social media) without some sort of idea about what you want to achieve from it, how much it will cost you – particularly in time, and what message you are sending out there about your company then it can be a complete waste of time at best or a very easy way to damage your reputation at worst! And,as  with all these things, writing it down helps you understand what you want from it, how you are going to do it and how you can measure if it has been worth it.

So here are a few questions to ask yourself to help you write your  strategy;

Which Social Media? – There are a lot of different places you could be from forums to Twitter and, of course blogs. You do not have to be on all of them but you do have to be on the ones where your clients are. For me I use the main 3 Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn but you may find that you only really need to be on one of these and write a blog.

Who is going to maintain it? - Whether there is only you or a team of people and you have 5 different platforms to update and a blog to write content for it can become very time consuming. So you need to think carefully about the first question in relation to how much time you can dedicate to keeping things updated. Think about how much time you can give to your platforms and then work out a reasonable amount of updates – this will vary depending on what type of business you are in.  Who is the best person then to update your sites? Does it have to be you or could you delegate or outsource it?

How regularly can you update it? – If it’s twitter it really needs to be daily and the same with keeping your presence on forum’s. Can you blog daily, twice a week or even only once a month? You do need to be realistic about what you can do, regularly updated content is better than no updates at all.

How are you going to find content for your social media? – Facebook Pages are great for engaging with people and asking their opinions or running promotions, you can’t just chat on Twitter and hope it will bring in clients – you need to tell them what you do in a non direct selling way, how will you change your tone for LinkedIn? Will you start a group or answer questions on LinkedIn? Perhaps create a hashtag on twitter and share information for a specified length of time?

What is your measure of success? – Is it more followers on Twitter or Likes on Facebook? Are you aiming for more subscribers to your blogs RSS feed or sign ups to your newsletter? Or is it about the conversion of contacts into actual paying clients? You need to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve with your social media engagement so you can measure if it has been worth the time investment you’ve put in, for example running a promotion on Facebook for a limited period should result in more sales etc.

Having considered these questions I would suggest writing out some aims on a monthly basis as a guide to approximately how much time will be spent on what platforms, by whom and roughly about what. Add in if you are going to run a promotion or a hashtag and what you hope to achieve from each activity. You could run the same campaign on Facebook first and then Twitter to see which is more successful for example. But the important part of this, once you have written your strategy, is to review it! Did you meet your stated aim, is it something you want to repeat in the future or what do you need to try next? And then amend your strategy accordingly. Because things change and so should your responses to them.