Social Media Strategy

2.1 The importance of strategy in establishing and choosing the social media
channels for reaching business objectives

There are many definitions of social media in the literature nowadays, especially due to the
high popularity of social media channels and their engagement reach. Thus, it has proved to
be an essential factor when achieving business objectives and establishing relationships with
the customer. These definitions vary amongst mentioning Internet based applications, creating
and exchanging User Generated Content and defining unique and valuable positions for
businesses. In addition to this, strategy has its own broad and multiple definitions starting
from Porter’s (that portrayed strategy as “different set of activities” that are employed in order
to create competitive advantage) and other definitions in the literature that utter the
importance of strategy in any organizations, thus emphasizing its crucial position (Effing and
Spil, 2016).
In this sense, Effing and Spil (2016) describe social media strategy as: “a goal-directed
planning process for creating user generated content, driven by a group of Internet
applications, to create a unique and valuable competitive position”. Further on in their
research, the authors define and describe the elements of a good social media strategy. In this
sense, the authors have completed an extensive literature review to find out the most common
elements of a social media strategy. Although, there are not predefined steps or a classic
approach towards this topic, the identified elements are as follow: target audience, channel
choice, goals, monitoring and content activities. Target audience refers to segmentation,
namely the groups of people that are more prone to develop a preference towards a specific
channel rather than others. This element of the strategy implies “several stakeholders, groups
and cultures.” Channel choice refers to the specific channel or channels chosen for
developing the strategy. For this particular element, the effectiveness and how appropriateness
of each channel should be thoroughly described. The next element, goals, refer to the business
objectives and the clear purposes of setting of the social media strategy. An important part in
this element is the degree in which each goal is measurable and concrete. Monitoring refers
to the metrics used in order to measure the impact and the efficiency of the social media
strategy. The impact is revealed through metrics such as likes, comments, questions, visitors
and followers. The last element of the social media strategy, as described by Effing and Spil
(2016) is represented by the content activities. This is usually performed through creating a
plan and a timeframe for the development of the campaign, thus proving its practicality. The
authors emphasize the “human voice” as an authentic and appropriate indicator when
measuring the effects of content activities.
Moreover, in establishing the return on investment and the efficiency of a social media
campaign, organizations need an effective strategy, as pointed out by Oliveira and Fugueira
(2015). In this sense, an alignment between social media approaches and business objectives
is crucial, together with the assessment of the overall organization performance against
competitors. For this purposes, a good metric is represented by social media analytics or web
based applications, many tools being free of additional cost and being able to provide
“valuable insights”.
As previously stated throughout this paper, organizations nowadays focus more and more on
their social media strategies and the campaigns developed in order to benefit from the
competitive advantage. Educational centers make no difference when coming to attracting and
engaging customers that benefit from their activity. Therefore, for the purposes of this paper,
an educational center has been chosen in order to increase its visibility and managing to
promote complementary training and additional courses through creating a social media
campaign using three different social media channels.
When it comes to the type of strategy employed through social media, three are most
remarkable, as pointed out by Oliveira and Fugueira (2017). These are: decentralized,
centralized and hybrid strategies. The decentralized strategy refers to placing the focus on
several areas/channels of interest, with approximately the same level of investment. The
centralized strategy refers to placing the focus on one or two areas (investing in these), while
placing little to no focus on other remaining areas. Finally, the hybrid strategy refers to
placing big amounts of investment in two or three areas and keeping a low investment in the
remaining ones. When addressing the stakeholder expectations, the authors cannot describe if
one strategy is better than any other or would result in a more efficient social media
campaign, therefore performance of a specific strategy cannot be measured (Oliveira and
Fugueira, 2017).
However, a cone strategy proves to be applicable to many organizations and effective in most
cases. As per the research performed, Effing and Spil (2016) proved the lack of efficient
measuring of the previously named strategies. Therefore, the authors suggest a cone strategy
as an efficient way of organizing the steps needed in the development of a social media
strategy. This strategy comprises all the elements of a social media strategy and divides them
into levels of maturity. Therefore, at the bottom level, the initiation, there are the target
audience and the channel choice. In the middle, the diffusion level, there are goals/business
objectives, resources and the policies that may affect the decisions taken and at the top level,
the maturity level, there are the monitoring and the content activities.