Social Strategy

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

The purpose of social strategy

The purpose of your social strategy is to address the ‘why’ of your business. So, the problem with social media is that sometimes we go into it without any specific goals. We just feel that because it’s something that we use on a daily basis, that it’s in our hand and in our phone and on our apps, that we know it and we understand it. However, like other channels, I don’t know how to buy TV, but I know how to watch TV, so we need to actually bring ourselves back to actually understanding this.

So what we're going to do is we're going to go take you through a very step-by-step stage-led process of how to develop and design social strategy. It is built with purpose in mind, and it’s also really important that through this process, there’s no silver bullet for social media.

We’re going to give you the framework, the support, and the background to be able to actually answer the challenge for your business. The solution is completely different for your brand or business and the next brand or business. If you copy what another brand or a business are doing, it sometimes won’t suit what you’re doing specifically and really the strategies that work are the ones that are fine-tuned and customized to your challenge.

What is social strategy?

‘Strategy’ is probably one of the most overused words in our industry and in most organizations. We all know what the word means, we all have used it, but unfortunately, we use it too much. And because of the fact that we use it too much, we often actually misunderstand it.

So strategy is about a long-term goal. It’s about answering that long-term goal. There are four specific points to strategy.

• Social strategy: This is the overarching kind of blueprint of how you operate on social media, but out of this, come other strategies that are important to identify.
• Content strategy: When we put our content out there, why do we do it? What are the guidelines? How does it operate? But more importantly, that that is guided by our overarching strategy.
• Media strategy: Media is any ads that you may buy or any integration you might have with, let’s say, a media publisher or website. It’s important, again, that we have guidelines for that, we know how to do it, and that it is all being informed by our overarching social strategy.
• Tactics: The most interesting thing about tactics is that tactics are often confused as strategy. You know, “Our strategy is to post on Facebook.” That’s not a strategy, that’s a tactic. So really what you have to do is try and actually almost limit your use of the word ‘strategy’. Try and think more like, “What do I need to do?” And if you can spend time developing your overarching strategy, that’s the roof over everything that you do. You’ll actually be able to use that to really cleverly inform absolutely everything you do. Your media and your content will be very closely aligned.