Getting a handle on social media has become a necessity in our increasingly digitised world. To gain effectively from social media requires tact, forethought and forward planning. A key first step is to do an analysis of your current efforts. Digital is exponential in change, so a clear and agile plan is needed to meet this challenge.
When assessing your current digital landscape, it’s recommended to include: technology, skills, data, content and a benchmark of your current performance. A digital assessment gives a benchmark to build upon and creates areference point for any future progress. This identi es the current gapbetween the current usage and importance to the business.
Success is driven by strategy. In the absence of a digital engagement strategy, the chances of hitting a brick wall are high. So the question becomes: what is a digital engagement strategy.
Simply put, it is a time-based plan that defines where your organization is today, where you need it to go, and ultimately, how to get there. A digital engagement strategy can help you provide a better target user experience and boost your return on engagement and bottom line.
Think of it like this: a digital engagement refers to all of the digital touchpoints your target audience has with your brand, including email, social media, applications and even your website. Digital engagement doesn’t just happen in a vacuum: it takes a plan.
“You can post on social media all day long, but without a plan, there’s no goal,” says Andy Crestodina, cofounder and chief marketing officer of Orbit Media Studios. “If your business is present on a digital channel, you need to have a strategy.”
At its core, digital engagement is about reaching out to people to create two way conversation. An effective digital engagement fosters dinner table-like conversation as opposed to being an echo chamber where you constantly churn out content and information that barely moves a needle of your target audience’s emotions.
At the outset, it is vital to determine why you want to engage on social media. This is largely informed by your organisational vision, mission, values and objectives. It’s important to stress that to be successful, the digital engagement strategy needs an informing framework, a band that brings everything together in a fluid manner.
Once the informing framework is properly defined, the next step involves identifying what makes the organisation great. What is special about your organization? What special cause are you fighting? How do you go about doing your business? What values guide how you approach your work?
These are all important questions to ask right at the beginning because they help to guide how you will frame and shape your content.
Most social media initiatives and tactics are ego-centric, for lack of a better phrase. They focusing on churning out instead of building a space for engagement. A better plan is therefore required to get better results.
Each digital channel needs a tailored strategy—they are levers that can be pulled for different goals. The channel determines the promotional strengths of your content. It is important to create a matrix of channels and topics to see where opportunities of digital engagement lie.
Measuring your efforts on social media cannot be overstated. The most effective way to know whether you are on the right track is to regularly report on your progress. The most powerful tool we have to drive long-term success is insights. You need to demonstrate success through a data-driven strategy.
Success is built on many parts coming together to create the whole. You need to have a plan (strategic and/or tactical), working alongside your deliveryactivity—across the whole funnel.
All built upon the right foundation — people, processes and technology.