Documenting a Social Media Channel Strategy

The accompanying social media channel strategy template, which you can download in the next step, will guide you through the creation of your own strategy document. The sections are as follows.

Section 1: Business goals
The key company goals, from which marketing and social media objectives are derived. Keeping these at the top of the strategy document ensures you remain aligned to these throughout your efforts on social media.

Section 2: Marketing objectives
These detail how the marketing department is contributing to the business goals and will refer directly to driving awareness, consideration, conversion and loyalty through communications-led activity.

Section 3: Social media objectives
Create SMART objectives for your strategy based on the marketing objectives. Create any number of them, as required by your overarching marketing goals, and ensure they are specific to each platform.

Section 4: Audience
Define the core audience or audiences you will be targeting with this strategy. There are two main sources of this information – from your social media platform insights, and from existing organisational personas. Compare the two, do they match? There may be a particular demographic skew in your social audience and this is important to take into account.

Beware of your social insights pushing you towards very broad audiences (e.g. men in the UK aged 18-35). This can damage your marketing, making it so general that it fails to resonate with anyone in particular.

As the old saying goes, “if you’re marketing to everyone, you’re marketing to no-one”. Find more specific information out about your typical follower in social, and look at individual profiles to help characterise them. If they differ from your organisational personas, create new ones for social media.

Section 5: Channels
Based on your goals, objectives and target audiences, decide which channels meet your needs.

Detail each channel’s role and objectives. Make sure you include, for each:

• How will your business leverage the functionality, the culture, the reach of this platform?
• What aspects of your brand’s personality will come out strongest on this particular social platform?
• Which subset of your audience could you reach here?

Overall, it should be clear what the key opportunities that operating on each platform presents to your business.