Jump in the Delorean – First we need a Social Media Strategy before we start posting content.

Yesterday I posted a short tactical article with a suggestion on how to engage your members via your Facebook business page audience.

Today I want to jump into the Delorean with you and go back to before I wrote that post.

If we don’t I become a bit of a hypocrite as I also wrote an article about a month ago – ‘One question you should ask yourself before starting any new project‘, which addressed the need to start with strategy, before tactics.

So let’s do that. Let’s first talk about a social media strategy for Destination Marketing Organisation.

What is your social strategy? What your organization’s social accounts are for? – (to be clear, I’m talking to corporate pages, not the consumer pages)

We know that most people who follow you are going to be members, members partners or employees, or other tourism industry stakeholders. So who do you pitch content to and what content?

If you recall the article The Steps to Write a Brand Strategy, you may recall strategy starts first with understanding your objectives. If you agree with this premise, then the first question to ask is, what are you trying to achieve through your organization’s social pages?

Is it to grow followers, increase likes and comments, or get more subscribers to your newsletter? Or something else?

I would speculate you are trying to achieve a couple of things;

• keep people posted on things going on in tourism (your workshops, broader campaigns, new and events, even state government and national news that impacts your region’s operators)
• you want to increase engagement in general, between your organization and members, and between themselves
• you want to improve the capability of your members by demonstrating good practices and setting a good example

If these are the goals, the objectives (the measurable metrics) that align with these goals are something like this;

• attendance of workshops and events (a result of more people being informed)
• member retention (a result of increased engagement, and as such, perception of the value of your membership)

Your social strategy and resulting activities should align with these objectives.

I’m going to jump a few steps in the strategy process to be able to pitch some ideas at you, for strategies for your social. However, you should really go through the 5 step strategy process here, before being locking in any strategy. Because there is no point choosing a brand, marketing, or marketing channel strategy (e.g. Facebook) if you don’t have the brand, team, resources, or motivation to execute it.

So here is an idea of what a social strategy might look like for your organisation;

We seed conversations our members care about, to increase a feeling of connection and community. We do this so we can influence participation in events, deliver greater value to members, and move them to other channels.

Tactically this means;

• We encourage sharing ideas, aspirations, and collaborations.
• We bias asking questions, rather than broadcasting.
• We share success stories.
• We regularly share opportunities that allow participation on our social channels.
• We don’t unconstructive comments.
• We want every social media follower to become a newsletter subscriber, so we create opportunities for people to discover this connection for themselves.
• etc.

You can see how once you have a strategy, the tactics start to become clearer. What makes sense to share or not share on social becomes more apparent. You also have a mandate, or rule book, to prevent other people in the organizations from hijacking the social audience for something that doesn’t fit the strategy.

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