This post is part of our celebration of social media week!

The thought of managing the day-to-day communication that will be required with a social media strategy can seem daunting. Common questions:

1. How will we know what to say and when to say it?
2. Who’s responsible for publishing content to the profiles?
3. How do we measure our success?

It will be essential for your team to identify someone, or a couple of people, to serve as the community managers of your social profiles. They will be responsible for tackling the above three questions but there are some tools that can make these tasks easier than you think.

1^st: Create a content calendar:

The goal of the content calendar is to force the community manager and the brand team to plan a week or a month’s worth of content in advance. This calendar can be as simple or complex as you like. The process of creating a content calendar is to round off your brand team including a copywriter or two and sit down with a calendar. Discuss the month ahead and identify potential shareworthy events that will be happening:

• Your brand: Is your brand launching a new indication or releasing new information?
• Your industry: Is anything happening in the industry (an awareness month, a congress, etc. . .) that affects your brand?
• The public: Are there any holiday’s or current events that relate to your brand?

Make a list of all of these things, choose which of them are the most valuable to address and write content to compliment them. Next assign the content to corresponding dates on the calendar.

Tips for content planning:

1. Stick to your strategy: ask yourself “does this help us accomplish our social media goals?”
2. Be consistent: consistency in tone of voice, vocabulary, emotion and timing all create a better experience for your community
3. Have a call to action: make sure all of your content includes a call to action or the answer to “So what?”

2^nd: Use a community management service

There are several free services available that help you manage your accounts all from one place. My personal favorite is Tweetdeck, but HootSuite is also good –

These services help you:

• Schedule your content publishing down to the minute
• Alert you when someone talks to you or mentions you online
• Manage multiple social profiles in one dashboard

Hootsuite and SproutSocial offer premium accounts that are affordable and include metrics and analysis of your social engagement.

These services are easy to learn and simple to use. The first step beyond setup is to grab your content calendar and schedule the posts that you created with your team. Once they’re scheduled, the tool does the rest of the publishing work for you. It’s up to you to monitor the consumer response to your post and craft a reply to the requests from your community.

3^rd: Measure success and optimize for the future

Your content has been planned, and executed. Now it’s time to take a look back and see how you did. Key things to measure:

1. Conversion: the number of comments per post
2. Amplification: the number of re-tweets or shares per post
3. Applause: the number of likes, favorites, etc. . . per post

Simply measuring the ratio of the above items is not enough. A deeper dive into the posts that generated the most return and the posts that generated the least return will identify patterns of success and failure. These patterns can be used to optimize the content you share in the future. Ideally, you’ll look at these metrics on a weekly or monthly basis, but no matter what – be sure to have the insights from these metrics on hand while planning your next wave of content so that you’re optimizing the level of community engagement.

This post is part of our celebration of social media week!

There is a common misperception that social media marketing is easy and free. While creating accounts on the world’s largest social networks is free and relatively easy, this is just one step of a social media strategy and can be likened to the wedding that marks the beginning of a marriage. In reality, there are a lot of questions to consider when evaluating the opportunity of investing in social media for your product. Taking the time to discuss these questions before engaging in social channels can lay the foundation for a rewarding venture:

Does your company have social media guidelines in place?
Your company’s social media guidelines serve as a great foundation for building a social media strategy. Good guidelines are built to serve as the rules of engagement and should include everything from their definition of social media to how to handle negative comments. They help protect your team, your product, and most importantly, your consumers and as such, it’s very important that your company enact guidelines before you begin engaging with consumers in these channels.

Have you established a social media workflow?
Before engaging in social media it’s important to establish an appropriate workflow to handle any of the various requests that may be asked by consumers engaging with your social profiles. It’s questions like these that require your team to have a workflow that:
a. Provides an accurate and appropriate response to the request
b. Responds to the request in a timely manner
Not having these workflows in place will create an experience for your consumers that is frustrating and thereby damaging to your relationship with them.

Do you have a clear reason for being in social media?
Before entering social media, it’s important to know the answer to one very important question:
What do you want to accomplish?
If the answer to this question cannot be achieved through a social strategy, then social media marketing is not right for your product at this time. Avoid being too quick to conclude that social media cannot assist in reaching brand goals though, an integrated social media strategy can accomplish much more than someone who is unfamiliar with social media channels beyond just Facebook and Twitter might expect. Participating in social media without a defined target accomplishment will result in your social media efforts lacking a call-to-action and thereby be of little value for your target audience. Likewise, having a target accomplishment will give your social strategy a purpose that will serve as a guiding principle for all of your content and actions within the social space.

Are people talking about your product online?
The answer to this question is undoubtedly “Yes!”. The underlying question is how much or how little, and just what are they saying? A quick search for your product on Google or any of the popular social networks will quickly direct you to conversations that can be eye opening. It’s important to understand this existing online conversation before entering the discussion. You can determine the current environment by conducting or contracting a social media listening report that will provide insights about social environment surrounding your brand.

Are these social conversations translating to real-life decisions?
The presence of people making decisions about your product or marketplace based on their social interactions is a positive indicator that you should be involved in social media. How do you know if this is happening? Observe the conversations already happening online – are people taking each other up on their advice? Do you see mentions of action having been taken? Things like “So, I asked my doctor about what you told me….” or “Do you know where I can buy the product you mentioned?” These actions speak to the degree of value your target audience finds from their social discussions; they’re taking suggestions from their online peers and acting on them in their daily lives.

In closing, there’s no denying that some products lend better to social media than others but even the most introverted of products can conduct a successful social media campaign if the proper questions have been answered thereby laying the foundation for a social media strategy that resides at the intersection of bringing value to the brand and bringing value to the consumers.