I’m often asked about social media strategies, whether DH has one, what our Twitter/Facebook/Pinterest etc strategy is. The short answer to this is we don’t have a stand-alone social media strategy, and there is a good reason for this.
The reason you don’t need a specific social media strategy, is that your use of social media should support your broader communications or engagement strategies, which in turn support the overarching objectives of your organisation/mission/campaign. This means your use of social media directly contributes to delivering the organisations objectives and should be measured in that way.
I’m not saying you don’t need a plan with tactics and defined social media objectives but that isn’t the same as a strategy.
From your communications or engagement strategy you should be able to identify what you want to achieve and who your target audience is. And from that you should be able to choose how best to use social media.
By linking your use of social media back to broader objectives, you’ll know what went well, what to do more of, what hasn’t worked, and what to stop.
You shouldn’t spend your time on things that a) are not working or b) don’t support organisation objectives. It’s important to be able to demonstrate how social media adds value to your work.
Here are some good examples of DH using social media to help deliver broader communications objectives: