Seven tips to bring your social strategy to the next level

Seven tips to bring your social strategy to the next level:

  1. Target social media for important business purposes.
  2. Ask your cross-functional teams if your website is enabling your interactive-brand ecosystem. You have one, but again, just like your social organization, it may not be optimized.
  3. Shift funds from traditional marketing to social media or community types of initiatives. It’s tempting to hang onto classic outbound marketing and classic communication or traditional media approaches, but there is so much opportunity if you explore the new channels.
  4. Implement a cross-functional community or social team with CEO and CMO sponsorship and senior executive leadership. Integrate traditional PR, social media, community hub, and thought leadership. Create a community hub both on your website and in person at events or where there are face-to-face conversations. Support from senior levels is very important to building a successful social organization.
  5. Staff up your social media roles with a distributed workforce that can collaborate and perform in real time. Plot where your organization is, which will help inform strategy and budget and hopefully help you secure what you need for the next phase.
  6. Redefine community in social metrics to align with business outcomes versus traditional-media performance. Think in terms of purpose, collaboration, and relationships with people across the diverse community that you are engaged with.
  7. Develop and deploy content, and then make sure it keeps getting better. Do it in a timely manner, blending campaigns and ongoing conversations. You may want to have a combination of people sharing that responsibility, or maybe you choose to have some people dedicated to campaigns and others dedicated to conversation, but they should be in sync and be collaborating amongst themselves.

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