Social media strategy that I use.

1. 1

2. This ebook was written back in late 2010 when I was still
employed by another startup. It was meant to address the
concerns of B2B businesses foraying into Social Media.
Unfortunately, it was never published.
On the bright side, I now have full ownership of this ebook. I’ve
updated on its writing style to add in a little humor but the
content here (is still serious stuff) is the workflow of how I do social
media for my clients/employers.
Internet social warrior,
Elisha Tan (@elishatan)
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3. Assess
Investigate Design
Advocate Organize
Narrate

4. Assess
“Know thy self, know thy enemy. A thousand battles, a thousand victories.” - Sun Tzu
Before you embark on a social media strategy, do an assessment on the social
media participation levels of players in your industry and on the current
sentiments of your company.
This are some of the questions that you need to answer at this stage:
 What are the social media channels adopted by your competitors?
 Are the channels owned by the companies or by their customers?
 What is their level of engagement like? Is it high, low or moderate?
 How often do they post an update?
 What kind of content do they put up?
 Who in their company manages the accounts?
You’ll find a checklist of questions in the next page.

5. Elisha’s social media ‘Assess’ checklist
Item
What are the social media channels adopted by
your competitors?
What is their level of engagement like? Is it high,
low or moderate?
How often do they post an update?
What kind of content do they put up?
Who in their company manages the accounts?
Which are the social media channels do you have
a presence on?
What are the sentiments people have on your
company? It is positive or negative?
How often does your company get mentioned?
On which social media channels are your
company mentioned in?
How do you measure up with your competitors?
What social media channels are your clients
using?
What are your clients talking about already?
1 | P a g e Elisha Tan • +65 929 868 55 • Elisha@learnemy.com

6. Assess
To help you with finding the answers to the questions, here are some free online
services that you can make use of.
 Addict-o-matic
This tool condense your search results from various search engines into a neat
interface. It includes the latest mentions from, social bookmarking, social
networking sites, blogs and includes videos and pictures results. This tool is useful
for real time search on what is being spoken about your company.
 SocialMention
It searches for mentions across many popular and unpopular social media
platforms while giving you the choice to streamline the platforms you want to
search from. The good point of this service is that it has its own metrics of
measurements like strength, sentiment, passion and reach.
Want to know how of such tools? Ask me at elisha@learnemy.com

7. Design
Like every business project, your social media efforts need to have a purpose.
When you are setting goals, consider the following tips to help you set
achievable goals.
 Be realistic
Building a community takes time. Thus, always plan a realistic time frame for your social
media efforts. This time frame will differ based on the type of tools and measurements, as
well as how much time and content your company is able to put into the plan.
 Be specific
Social media is broad, therefore you need to be as specific as you can on what you want to
achieve (e.g. increased lead conversion rates, build awareness, maintain relationships,
increase efficiency of resolving customer service issues, etc.). It is only when you have
specific goals that you are able to choose the right metrics to evaluate your social media
efforts.
Being specific also means that you need to know what each social media channel is used
for. Each social media tools has their own unique ‘personalities’. For example,
LinkedIn is a professional site while Facebook is a casual informal site. Hence for each
tool, a company needs to be able to present itself appropriately while maintaining
consistency in its corporate image.

8. Design
After identifying your goals, you will need to consider what success looks like in
your campaign by identifying the right metrics to measure your social media. A
couple of metrics are listed below.
Activity Metrics Customer Support and visibility
• Unique visitors • Customer satisfaction
• Network size • User ratings and reviews
• Number of fans, followers • Number support tickets per customer
• Comments per period
• Time spent on site • Search engine rankings
• Downloads • Web traffic referrals
• Page views
• Social sharing
• How many times your content is
shared
• Duration of stay
• Bounce rate
• Visitors loyalty

9. Design
There is no magic combination of tools that will ensure every company’s
success. Each company will have to decide which are the tools to adopt
base on the purpose of the social media efforts.
 Channels as social settings
Each social media tools has their own unique ‘personalities’. For example,
LinkedIn is a professional site while Facebook is a casual informal site. Hence for
each tool, a company needs to be able to present itself appropriately while
maintaining consistency in its corporate image. This is certainly not easy. Hence,
your team needs to be able to understand the ‘personalities’ of each social media
tool before embarking a campaign.
 Applications for each channels
You will have to decide on the applications for each social media channel as well.
Applications can help create a better experience on your social media channels
and increase the ease of being a follower/fan of your channels

10. Organize
Social media is based on constant content updates and real-time responses. There
are a couple of ways in which you can man your social media platforms. You can
either leverage on your current staffs, hire new staff who is trained in social media
or outsource to an agency.
 Outsourcing to agencies
Outsourcing leverages on the expertise of agencies, whom have done such campaigns
many times. This will help to keep your company’s workload in check while undertaking
social media.
Pro: Agencies are efficient in what they do. Hence entrusting your social media efforts to
them is the best bet that the technicalities of social media will not hinder your success.
Con: Although part of your ‘team’, agencies do not work for your company. Hence their
knowledge on your products or your internal workings are limited. Also, communication
from the agency instead of from the company representative may be perceived as
unauthentic and insincere, which are negative perceptions that you want to steer away
from your social media efforts.

11. Organize
 Leveraging on current staff
Your current staff may be social media users themselves who know how to use them
effectively on a personal level. These people will be a good start to your social media efforts
as they would then require lesser training to be effective at using these tools at the
professional level. The figure on the right
shows the department who is in charge of their
company’s social media efforts.
Pro: Employees have extensive knowledge about
the internal workings of your company which
are important source of content to be
provided. Not only that, building a
relationship with people within the company
seems more authentic than building it with
an agency.
Con: Adding more responsibilities to current
employees means that the current workload
needs to be restructured internally.

12. Organize
 Hiring New Staff
You may want to hire a new staff solely for social media. This will ensure that you have a
skilled personnel in your team.
Pro: This option allows you to have a skilled person manning your social media efforts while
this person will also be aware of the internal workings of your company, hence will be
able to communicate effectively and authentically using social media platforms.
Con: Hiring itself can be a troublesome process.
For small business:
I recommend that small businesses use a mixture of current staff and outsourcing. The agency
will be able to provide a kick start to your social media strategy and also guide your existing
staff..
For startups:
Founders are great source of content. As you probably don’t have the budget to hire a big
agency, try going for a smaller one who needs your job to establish itself. Either that, bug a
social media marketer friend of yours for tips and know-hows. :D

13. Narrate
To ensure a stream of updates, editorial planning is important. It can be a weekly
or monthly schedule depending on your team. Here are some issues that you
need to consider.
 Developing a voice
A company needs to be able to decide on a corporate voice based on its brand
personality. This corporate voice then will be used in all social media channels adopted by
the company. This voice will not affect much of the choice of social media channels as
slight amendments to the voice is fine. It’s the same idea behind how a person can
behave slightly different in a pub and a meeting but remains largely the person he is.
 Posting Schedule and Topics
Background research needs to be done to understand
what social media tools your customers are currently using,
what kind of information will be of use to them, right down
to the timings that most of your prospects go online. This
will come in handy while you generate content, plan
publishing schedule or plan the schedule of your team
members to interact on the accounts for your social media
tools.

14. Narrate
 Social Media Policy
Another issue to consider is how much control are you going to have in the page. By this it
means that the what are the things you will delete off your social media platforms and/or
how you are going to respond to negative comments. There is no strict rule on what type of
comments are allowed or not, it all depends on your brand image (conservative or friendly)
and how trained are your staff in managing these comments. A good balance is vital to not
translate that there is no freedom of speech in your platforms or that your platforms are too
cluttered with spams. Training your staff in this aspect is very important, there are many
crises that are aggravated due to the employee’s mismanagement in the initial negative
comment.
 Automation versus Authenticity
Automation can be done in the form of publishing content and replying to comments.
However, there is a thin line to be draw between saving time and sacrificing authenticity
through automation, even more so since social media engagement is about the business of
authenticity. A good balance is to automate publishing schedule but to use a mixture of
automation (such as a ‘thank you for joining’ or a ‘message received’ message) and real-time
replies (when faced with a question or complain) when it comes to communicating with your
audience.

15. Narrate
Even though different tools have different personalities, you need to integrate them together to ensure
coherence in your brand identity. Your content should also be broadcasted across multiple social media
tools for maximum efficiency. This process can be made easy by online tools. Here are 2 free aggregation
tools that we strongly recommend.
 Hootsuite
This tool allows you to schedule updates to social sites like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook,
Wordpress, Ping.fm, Myspace and Foursquare. Not only that, you can also connect it to to your
RSS feed and send your blog updates to your social media streams. It also has a neat multi-column
layout that allows you to Create and customize columns that can be dragged and dropped in any
order while organizing your social streams into news, keywords, friends and more. Mobile updates
are also supported for the use of Hootsuite from iPhone.
• Tweetdeck
Just like Hootsuite, this tool allows you to schedule updates except to Wordpress and Ping.fm.
However, the Tweetdeck platform is available for desktop, iPhone and iPad and it works on Mac, PC
or Linux system. Like other social media aggregators, Tweetdeck has a column-style format that
silos your information that you can customize its colours and choose how you want the interface to
look like. You can also set up notifications and filters or organize your Twitter lists, as well as seeing
Twitter trends.

16. Advocate
You need to tell people about your social media presence. Here are some
suggestions that you can adopt.
 Leverage on existing technologies within social media platforms
 Linkedin groups
▪ Joining LinkedIn groups and introducing your company there can bring visibility to
your social media channels or referrals.
 Youtube tags
▪ Youtube allows you to add up to 500 characters as tags. Tagging your video will help
Youtube’s search engine to find your video.

17. Advocate
 Integrate social media channels with current marketing efforts.
 Website
▪ Include links and applications that inform visitors of your web site to your social
media channels. For Facebook, do include an application that allows your visitors to
‘like’ your Facebook page without leaving your website. As for Twitter, such
applications are not developed yet so only links can be used.
 Other forms of media
▪ Tell people about your social media channels verbally or in print. This method
however requires you to acquire usernames that are simple and easy to remember.
Caveat: this method os known to have poor conversion rates.
▪ Also make use of mobile applications to promote your social media channels

18. Advocate
 Purchase social media ads
 Twitter
▪ Twitter recently launched ‘Promoted accounts’ where brands can pay for it’s account
to be suggested to users.
 Facebook ads
▪ Facebook allows you to advertise to your specific target market. There are two kinds
of ads - self-served and sponsored. The former ads appear on pages and profiles
while the latter ads appear on the home page. Sponsored is more expensive.

19. Advocate
 Social media etiquette
Social media etiquette is based solely on respect. This means to respect your customers in
replies to their comments be it nasty or not. It also means respect to your competitors by not
gate-crashing their social media sites with self-promoting comments. Remember, social
media is about the voice of the consumers, so let them voice out for you in relations to
competition.
 Post-purchase affirmation
The period between when a purchasing decision is made to when the deal is signed and
officially “closed” is critical. Use social media to reaffirm their choice is the right one. This
can be done by providing customer support when they ask questions on your social media
sites.
 Identifying needs
Many of your existing customers aren’t going to tell you explicitly when they need an
additional product or service from you. So you’re going to have to monitor their social media
interactions to spot the cues. Be especially attentive to the complaints of existing
customers—you may stop them from being poached by a competitor. By incorporating
social media into lead nurturing, marketers can better understand and interact with
prospects and customers, and increase the relevancy of their marketing campaigns.

20. Investigate
After you have put in time and effort in building up your social media presence, you need to
be able to track whether you social media efforts have been successful or not. Here are some
recommendation of free listening tools.
Alerts
 Google Alerts
Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on
your choice of query or topic. You need to fill a form to choose the type of media, how often do
you want to receive the alerts, up to how many results per email and the email to be delivered to.
Google Alerts allows you to set up keyword searches for the name of your company or
competitors, for example, and receive updates in your email inbox or through an RSS feed.
Site Monitoring
 Google Analytics
This is a tool that you have to install in your website. It track website performance thus helping
you to find out how you are doing on your website. From it’s comprehensive reports, you can
understand the demographics of your users, time they spent on site, where did they come from,
page views, user loyalty, what is the top content on your site and allow you to set goals. It is also
compatible with Google Adsense and Google Adwords. You can choose to have your results
shown for by day, week month and year. You may email the results or export the report into PDF
or XML files.
Trend Analysis
 Google Trends
This tool shows portray how often a particular search term or terms is entered relative to the total
search volume across regions and cities of the world, and in various languages. You can compare
the volume of searches between two or more terms and the main news explaining spikes in
activity. Results can be exported as a CSV file.

21. Investigate
For a much more in-depth measurement, you need to engage in a related service provider.
Here are some recommendation of paid tools for in-depth analysis.
 Scout Labs
Scoutlabs has a great clean interface and overall excellent features for volume trending, sentiment-
tracking, learning about key quotes (based on sentiment), and managing workflow for response
management. Unlimited results helps protect you from increased monthly cost due to unexpected
spikes in volume. Moreover, you can display the findings with your logo on it, creating a more
professional look.
It also provides good customer support via email or phone and also delivers the report to your email
inbox. Not only that, it also helps you to communicate more effectively with your customers with their
sentiment engine that assesses the tone of your content. Prices start from USD249 per month but a 14
day free trial is available.
 Radian6
Radian6 provides a one-stop shop to all the data you need for tracking and to hone your expertise as
web analytical skills. Integrated workflow, alerts, sentiment, monitoring across blogs, forums, news,
Twitter, and more is what this social media monitoring tool has to offer. Radian6 tracks mentions across
over 100 million social media sites and sources and returns the results for exploration, understanding and
action.
It lets you view relevant conversations happening around your brand and products in real time. We
aggregate those conversations across various sources of platforms and put them into visuals that make
analysis and measurement meaningful and actionable. Radian6 also provides a desktop application
helps your company listen, engage, and coordinate your outreach across teams. Prices start from
USD600 per month, however, demos are available.

22. Investigate
Once knowing what works and what don’t, you have to adjust your content to
suit your audience in terms of what is being delivered and how it is delivered.
 Repurposing your content
You may have realized that certain mediums of channels are more ‘digestible’ than other
by your audience. It is thus important to be able to repurpose your content in different type
of mediums for consumption. Some examples of repurposing include:
 Breaking up a position paper or a white paper into a series of blog posts to be read.
 Make your content into the bunch of informative audio podcasts that your audience
can listen to during their daily commutes.
 Breaking up a conference where you videotaped several speeches by your company's
subject matter experts can become a series of online videos.
 Publish a Powerpoint presented at an industry event as an online slideshow.
 The industry data that your team regularly tracks can becomes a stream of Facebook
status updates that your market can subscribe to and remain informed of industry
developments while working remotely.
 The case study PDFs that you've published can become a "best practices series"
delivered through a set of special Webinars.
 Having your CEO delivering an overview of the annual report via a video uploaded on
Youtube.

23. The model of a social media communications strategy is a
cyclical one. As social media platforms constantly innovate,
advertising and engaging customers via these tools will go
through changes as well. Thus, it is very
important a company constantly
reinvent its strategy to meet
the ever-changing industry.
After measuring your efforts,
evaluate them against that of
your competitors and make
amendments to your goals and
plans accordingly.

24. A psychology and social media practitioner, Elisha Tan devotes her
time to study the applications of social media and its impact on the
social, economy and business arenas. As a hobby, Elisha maintains
a blog where she pens down her thoughts and experiences on
entrepreneurship and social media.
You may drop her an email at elisha@learnemy.com, follow her
@elishatan or link up with her professionally on LinkedIn.
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