What are your social media strategy goals and objectives?

Before you can determine which social media platforms you are going to use you should be clear on what your goals are and what you are looking to achieve through your activity. Keep it simple and targeted to a specific audience as this will help you measure the results when you have outlined your strategy.

Social Media can be a wonderful avenue for lead generation activities, increasing brand awareness, building a community and managing a business’s reputation but think carefully about what it means to your business and the arenas where you could maximise the message you are trying to portray.

For the aforementioned goals within a B2B environment, LinkedIn and Twitter are perfect places to start your adventure and from experience are fantastic avenues to generate additional sales leads when you dedicate the time to execute your message.

You may have the objective to gather photographs or images from your target audience on a related subject or product and getting them to take an action such as ‘liking’ or tagging your business helping you to reach your followers’ connections – after all people like to follow people in a near lemming like way. If you like something on Facebook how many of your friends will see it in their activity stream?

In a B2C world this can work particularly well on social networking sites such as Facebook, Google+, Pinterest and even Instagram where images and photographs come in to their element within social media, a near perfect example of this is IKEA’s Facebook Showroom as shown in the video below.

This is just a couple of ideas of goals and objectives that you may want to embark on, but think about the business as a whole, brainstorm your business goals and objectives and how this can fit in with your social media strategy by listing your Top 5 objectives. A good rule to following is keeping them “SMART” (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Time based).

Once you have done this write a description on how your social media objectives fits in with the wider business communication plan and remember that social media is there to support your current and future campaigns not replace them.