Top 10 tips for setting your social media strategy

Jamie Grenney, senior director of social media at salesforce.com has some top tips for those looking to implement a successful and sustainable social media strategy

1. Start by listening. For example, do a 7-day Twitter audit and see what people are saying about your brand. Bucket the conversations, get a feel for volume, and see what conversations are actionable.

2. Understand your audience. What motivates them to participate? What do they want to talk about?

3. Identify the opportunity. Is there an existing process you want to re-engineer? Or maybe an existing behaviour you want to encourage? The key is to tap into pent up demand and find something that is mutually beneficial.

4. Focus on ideas with impact. This will help you get resources you need to be able to deliver high-visibility wins and ideally measurable ROI. It may take time to get there, but you should have a vision of how the initiative maps to important business objectives.

5. Understand your channels. There are three pillars to social media: Conversations on your site (blogs, Answers, Ideas), your official channels (YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn), and other conversations on the web (Twitter, 3rd party blogs, 3rd party forums). Which of these channels do you want to support?

6. You can start small, but don’t start weak. You might start by supporting just one channel, but don’t make the mistake of starting weak. Initial momentum is very important to the success of your initiative.

7. Join the conversation. Your goal is to facilitate a conversation between the brand, your customers, and their networks. Make sure you are a good host, engaging people in conversation and making your presence felt.

8. Recognize top contributors. Build direct relationships with the top contributors within your community and people you see as influential. These individuals are critical to your success.

9. Map social media to your business. To get broad participation and maintain momentum, it’s important to map your social media initiative to your existing processes. Start thinking about how you can integrate social media into your CRM application and measure results on the same dashboards that you use for your other marketing metrics.

10. Focus on customer success. To build and mobilize evangelists, there is nothing more important than focusing on their success. Build a great product, a great user experience, and take their feedback to heart.