How to create a Social Media Strategy for your Business

Do we need to define "Social Media"? Let us try, social media: “online tools that people use to share content, profiles, opinions, insights, experiences, perspectives and media itself, thus facilitating conversations and interaction online between groups of people”.

We will go by this definition and jump straight to tools. Social media online tools includes blogs, message boards, podcasts, micro blogs, bookmarks, networks, vlogs, etc. There are no clear boundaries between these different application types. They are often interconnected. For example, Facebook offers photo sharing as well as social networking, bookmarking and private messaging.

A few prominent examples of social media tools including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Wikipedia, LinkedIn, etc.

Why Do Businesses Need A Social Media Strategy

In order to provide information and advice to stakeholders, the public and the media, today, everyone should have communication strategies. A major part of the communication strategy today is the social media strategy. A social media strategy describes your approach to the use of social media. It identifies and addresses the many issues raised by the use of social media. It then sets out a vision for the use of social media and describes phases of an approach to achieve that vision. The strategy also should include actions, procedures and guidance for taking forward the strategy.

The social media strategy should be used as a part of the communication strategies or built into your communications strategies. The purpose of a social media strategy is to address any issues that are raised by the development and use of social media.

The popularity of social media is a fact. Conversations about you and issues related to you are happening as you are reading this. Many relevant people are already involved in these conversations in a personal capacity. Today’s digital audience expects your involvement and the only way to influence – positively or negatively – the outcome of those conversations is to be involved.

Phases of a Social Media Strategy 

Your social media strategy need to be implemented in phases, roughly three phases. Phases one and two should be considered as pilots, test runs. The learnings from these stages should be compiled and reviewed before final stage is embarked upon.

Phase I: Online presence 

Both for English and Dhivehi (/Latin)

1. Facebook and Instagram account should be created.

2. Twitter accounts should be established.

3. A LinkedIn page should be created.

4. A Wikipedia entry should also be established.

5. A YouTube Channel should be created.

The Twitter Facebook and Instagram accounts should be used for:

• Promoting your work
• Promoting, responding to or correcting public stories in the media
• Sharing advice and information to create awareness
• Engaging in dialogues with stakeholders and the public
• Listening, monitoring and evaluating stakeholders and the public’s opinion.
• Linking to other related work by other organisations and individuals.

Proactive bilingual content should be prepared in advance and signed off by the appropriate topic leaders. Also reactive content should be created/provided with the support of the appropriate topic leaders. You should also regularly review who to follow/unfollow.  

A list of reputed speakers, who might be happy to respond reactively on behalf of you, should be compiled for use in emergency or out of hours situations.

People, groups and organisations in the following categories should be followed by businesses:

• Government Ministries, Ministers & Officials
• Media & Journalists
• International Organisations
• Local Councils
• Presidents, MPs & Influencial people, both local & International
• Academia
• Relevant individuals 

Suggestions on whom to follow/unfollow can be reviewed as needed.

Your social media accounts should be promoted through your website, news, other means like email signatures. Links should be made from relevant web pages, email signatures and should be amended accordingly.

Phase II: Service/Team/staff presence 

After establishing a social media presence, the second phase is to develop a network of public services, teams and individuals using social media to engage on public and related issues.

You should be responsible for some of this but responsibility also lies with other organisations and individuals. Where your services, teams or projects identify the need for a social media presence, advice should be sought from others. In each it should be considered whether a social media presence is the most effective way to reach the intended audience. This will also help to ensure continuity with the aims of the team’s overarching communications strategy. The possibility of using social media for specific purposes such as progress updates could also be explored. In this context, social media is just one part of a programme’s/project’s/team’s communications strategy and not an end in itself. 

Increased digital profile via social media will signpost people to the associated web pages. If these are out of date it could create a poor impression. Therefore, the team requesting a social media presence will need to ensure that its web pages are maintained and updated. 

Team/project/staff social media accounts should be linked to the relevant web pages. In addition to links to the social media accounts, people with their own professional/team/project social media accounts should also carry a link to them in their email signatures. 

Full training should be available to teams and individuals on how to use social media. This second phase should not take more than 6 to 12 months to fully implement.

Phase III: Open to all 

Social media use in phases one and two should be reviewed before phase three is to be undertaken. Depending on the outcome of this review, discussions should commence to explore the possibility of giving access to social media sites to all related representatives.

Representatives should be free to use their personal social media profiles. Keeping within the limits of their knowledge and competence, and within the boundaries of company policies, will help to tell your story and work in a way which reaches everyone.

People using their personal social media accounts to talk about business issues are free to conduct these conversations in their language of choice. People should be encouraged to follow/befriend these social media accounts. They may choose to share relevant content and may also choose to share other people's content.

Proposed Social Media Action Plan for Businesses

Action	Lead	Status/Implement Due Date
Establish Twitter account
Establish Facebook & Instagram account
Establish LinkedIn presence
Establish  YouTube channel
Write Wikipedia entry
Develop process for developing, signing off and monitoring  social media content
Develop process for seeking social media content
Develop training package on using social media usage
Develop out of hours translation protocol for social media updates
Revise email signature guidance to incorporate links to social media accounts
Review appropriate Government/Legal policies to ensure they cover social media use in their scope
Review phase one and two