Navigating Social Media: How to Build a Strategy That Works for You

?Often social media managers feel obligated or pressured to adopt every new platform that begins to gain traction. Unless your social media team includes content creators for every platform, this is unrealistic to maintain and it’s not good practice.

It always feels like there’s a lot of excitement to start a new social media channel for every new campaign, program, event and so on, but not enough thought going into where the content will come from, who will manage the channel and how it will be maintained. While it’s easy and usually free to start a new account on a social media platform, quality content and maintenance of an account do not come easy or free.

As more and more social media platforms pop up, many organizations are not adding resources or people to help with the ever-expanding responsibilities of managing social media. This leads to an impractical expectation that a lone social media manager will handle all the current channels while taking on new ones.

Here are five questions that should be answered before starting a new channel:?

1. Are you creating the account because it’s the hot, trendy new platform, or could it actually help to support your organization’s mission and achieve your goals? (If the answer is that we want to follow the crowd onto the hot, trendy new platform, the conversation should stop here, with the understanding that you can always re-assess the platform in the future if your organization’s needs, goals or strategies change)?

1. Do you have the resources to manage the channel? (If the answer is no, then a discussion about where to obtain the resources needed to properly run a new social media channel should be had first before moving on)?

1. Is your audience currently on the platform??

1. Do you have a content management process for the new channel??

1. How will you track your progress??

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Be an active observer first?

I understand the need to open an account early in a new up-and-coming platform in order to grab your organization’s name in the space before anyone else does but doing that doesn’t mean you need to start using the channel immediately—or ever. It’s perfectly okay to state in the bio that it is currently not an active channel. This is a common practice for organizations and is not looked upon negatively. It pays to be an active observer of a new platform before jumping on to it as a brand, seeing how the platform develops, who adopts it and how it’s used. It may be that the platform is not a good current fit for your organization or your industry and there is no sense in investing a lot of resources, or the few resources you have, to manage it.?

When watching a platform develop, you might find that the audiences it attracts aren’t the audiences you’re seeking to reach. It’s better for a brand to get on a platform knowing an audience you want to target is active in the space. Are your peers or competitors on it, and if so, are they using the app successfully? Are they growing audiences? Is there a compelling reason to make it a part of your strategy? If you do find that it’s a current fit, learn how the community likes to utilize the application and how those who have found success in the space are engaging their audiences. Think through the content you might want to share on the platform instead of just posting the same content you’re using for your other channels, and in the same way. This is why it’s beneficial to observe first because you can learn how to optimize your content for the new channel.?

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Social media should not fall under “other duties as assigned”?

Change is omnipresent in the industry—social media managers are always learning how to use new platforms, digital tools and technologies. Social media is no longer a hobby or a pastime, it’s a growing industry. It has become much more sophisticated and complex as time passes and technology advances. Maintaining social media channels for an organization requires, at the very least, a full-time position dedicated to the organization’s social media presence. I would even argue one full-time position is not enough, and that it takes a team. It certainly should not fall onto the list of duties of a junior member of a department as an afterthought, not if you want to see results.?

In its simplest form, maintaining social media channels involves posting content regularly, which requires having content to post and publishing the content to the platforms. This is time-consuming.??

An organization’s social media presence is its public presence and brand voice; there is no un-coupling the organization’s social media identity from the brand identity. If you wouldn’t leave it up to a junior staff member to manage the organization’s public-facing content and communications, you should probably rethink it if you have a junior staff member managing all the social media channels in addition to the regular duties they were hired to do. In addition to all the social media-related responsibilities, those who are full-time social media managers often serve as their own audio-visual team and information technology support.?

We need to start thinking about social media as a team sport. Each position on the team would serve a unique and necessary function, and there should be bench players available to complete the team. To be successful, it requires the full-time attention of a number of people.?

The above is an edited extract from Organic Social Media. Read more here: https://bit.ly/3RalURv ?