Excellent Social Media Strategy Diagram

If you are a social media strategist, below is social media strategy diagram that you will find extremely useful.  Posted by Marc Campman on the Marketing 2.0 network (but originally developed by David J. Carr), it groups the development and roll out of a social media strategy in four distinct phases.

click diagram to open high res version in new window.

Phase 1: LISTEN. In this phase you have to define your key stakeholders and listen to what they are doing on the web and social arena. Its just like real marketing. Who is your target market, and what do they need. The only difference now is that standard market research won’t do the trick. You now have to find the online places where they are and listen to what they are saying. About you, your product, your service, the market etc.

Phase 2: UNDERSTAND. Again, marketing 101. But with a slight difference. Now that you have identified them and grouped them in what David calls tribes, you have to give them something they belong to. Something they can join. In social media terms this is called joining a community. Just like the real tribes do. And once you’ve done that you then feed the tribes with relevant and interesting objects. This is the content. This can be tools, widgets, apps, videos, photos, ideas, assets or any other content. As long as it is relevant to them.

Phase 3: ENGAGE. This is probably the most important phase of the roll out. Mingle with the tribes. Play their games, have conversations and connected experiences. But make sure you use their preferred platforms, their personalised pages, or the video and photo sharing sites they use. Even simple email can be effective in this stage. Its about enable, encourage and optimise for sharing the social objects created in the previous stage. If this is done properly, the content will be shared on Blogs and niche sites, will be replicated on other social networks and will ultimately drive the creation of communities and forums. In this phase, paid for media (Online ads, promo links or Google Adwords) can be used to stimulate further distribution of the content.

Phase 4: MEASURE, REACT & RESPOND. This phase is critical. This is where you measure the effectiveness of your campaigns. Whether you achieve the anticipated results. In Webjam we do this in three levels of sophistication. REACH, ENGAGEMENT, BRAND. From very simple traffic analysis, to community engagement and ultimately to brand sentiment analysis. This data can then be used as input to finetune the strategy and this makes it a vicious circle.

Read More: Marketing 2.0 Update 6 – Social Media Campaign Diagram