So you have you’re social media strategy, now what? If you’re like mostorganizations then you can’t roll out a social media campaign in a day, or even ina few weeks. So how do you go about rolling out a social media strategy? Myrecommendation would be to proceed in phases. What I’m outlining below is a veryhigh level approach to rolling a social media strategy. Many of these phases willalso have sub-phases. For example, during the content creation phase you may wantto start out with something simple such as a blog or twitter account your firstmonth and then in month 2 roll out a youtube channel.Phase 1 Setting up Your Listening Dashboard/Analytics/etc (Month 1)Before you get started with anything make sure that you have tools in place tohelp you track your various key metrics. You can use something like googleanalytics to measure traffic (among many other things) and something like netvibesto build a listening dashboard (something that will help you keep track of all ofthe relevant conversations going on in your space). It would be great to havethese things set up at least one month before any type of efforts are rolled outso that these tools have time to collect and aggregate data about your site. Thiswill help with creating an accurate benchmark to paint a “before and after”picture.Phase 2 Account/Profile Creation and Branding (Month 1-2)Once you have your listening dashboards and analytics tools set up you can beginto proceed with account/profile/tool/platform creation. This means doingeverything from creating your twitter account and facebook fan page to setting upyour tweetburner account to track how many people are clicking on links you submitthrough twitter. Make sure to brand everything, people need to be able to readilyidentify with your social media channels.Phase 3 Content Creation (Month2-3)You’re listening dashboard and analytics tools are all in place and all of yoursocial media channels are created and branded. The next step is to create contentthat is going to be shared/distributed across these social media channels. Thisis something that you should already understand how to do (since it should havebeen a part of your strategy). You should already have a schedule set up for howoften your going to blog, tweet, etc. You should also have your internal socialmedia policies created and everyone at your organization should be on the samesocial media page (so to speak).As mentioned above your content creation may be broke up into several sub-phases.You may want to roll out a twitter account one month and a microsite the nextmonth.Phase 4 Content Distribution and Promotion (Month 3-4)I mentioned content distribution a little bit above but I want to expand on thathere. During this phase you want to make sure that you are cross promotion yourcontent across various channels and you need to have your main social media hub inplace. People on twitter should know about your youtube videos and people onfacebook should know about your twitter account. During this phase I would alsohighly recommend doing such things as a blogger outreach campaign andpartnership/syndication push.Phase 5 Community Building (Month 4-5)Technically this should be happening throughout your whole social media campaign.So what do I mean by community building? Well, once your content is created andyou start building trust and authority online your focus should now include muchmore than just site traffic. You want to encourage repeat traffic and you wantto build a community of people that you can reach out to. Community building caninclude everything from setting up a newsletter to launching contests and special
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