Top 3 Elements To Build A Successful Social Strategy

This question was posed to experts who build Social Strategies within their companies or for their clients. Their responses varied based on their degree of expertise in Digital Marketing and the nature of the business they are involved in. A comprehensive analysis revealed the top 3 elements needed to build a successful social strategy. The top 3 elements according to their order of importance are as listed below:

1. Defining business objectives & KPI’s
2. Getting the Messaging Right
3. Engaging with Customers

1. Defining business objectives & KPI’s – This is the most crucial and key element which will define if your social strategy is successful or not. By ‘defining business objectives’ what it means is that an organization needs to be clear on the goals it seeks to achieve by engaging in a social strategy. Organizations need to integrate business goals with social media strategies to see value from their efforts. The goals set have to be measured periodically against the KPI’s set by an organization while defining a social media strategy.
2. Getting the Messaging Right –   Post defining business objectives, it is important for an organization to convey the message to their targeting audience. Some of the key ingredients that will help the organizations get the messaging right include:
   1. What are its brand values, how are they reflecting in the message?
   2. What is the brand aiming to improve through its social strategy?
   3. How will a brand communicate its promise including emotional and functional?
   4. How will the customers perceive a brand’s social strategy?
3. Engaging with Customers – Having foresight into how customers will perceive the messaging lays the foundation to building relationships with customers. As part of the digital customer-brand engagement, organizations need to have systems in place that monitor and reveal the good, the bad and the ugly of a brand. As part of the engagement process, the organization receive multiple opportunities to either position, rectify its messaging, redefine its target audience and most importantly build relationships with its target audience. Almost all the experts vouch for having Customer Engagement as an integral part of an organizations social media culture.

Some of the other important elements to build a successful social strategy include:

4. Measuring social engagement results

5. Getting buy-in from the senior management which may include raising budgets for social media spend

6. Displaying creativity

7. Being Authentic

The experts who participated in this study are or were associated with companies like Facebook, Linkedin, Hootsuite, Starbucks, etc.

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