GYoung Digital Blog

OK, you share how we should get started, but now I want to ask you…. How should I get started?

Something occurred to me just a few minutes ago before I sat down to start working on this blog post; How should I market myself? I spent a lot of time thinking about my business cards, and my About Me page on my blog, and my services page, and all of my audience facing communications – which I should, I understand! You can’t run a business unless people know you exist, and the only way that people know you exist.

However, it occurred to me that I might have been thinking too much about my presentation pages more so than my actual content. I asked myself the question, “Ok, suppose I have a good About page, and I have good business cards… but what will people see when they explore what I actually have available?”

And then I thought, am I contradicting one of my points in my post from the other day? Was I thinking more about finding clients more so than getting my content in order?

So, I’m going to step back and think about my content, create the work I want to do, the work I can do, and the work that I want people to pay me for.

With that said, let’s get to work and create a social strategy.

What should the strategy focus on?

I have a solution.

Solution:

As of this writing, I am on a freelance assignement with the one and only *drum roll please* Amazon – AWS, specifically.

So far good.

Doing a little bit of research, I discovered that AWS does hold its own events, and lucky me, they have an event going live in a couple weeks:

Boom. I got an event to do something on.

Now, I have a product, and I have dates. Now:

Next Steps.

This is really an extension of the previous post – The last post was very, very broad with the getting started part, but this post is going to dig even deeper into what you actually need to do to create your social media plan.

In fact, it is no exaggeration to say that this is what you need to do when you create a social media plan. This is what you will learn about if you take a free social media certificate course, or if you learn about digital media in grad school. These are the things you need to know if you are doing agency work.

What you need to do:

• A social media audit
• A SWOT Analysis
• An editorial calendar
• Goals
• Objectives
• Tactics
• A 6-pack of beer

Ok, I made up that last one, but I think it’s appropriate because the kind of stress that you’ll go under to put together those plans will probably drive you to drinking a lot of beer – or some kind of alcohol.

Future posts will go into even greater detail of what you’ll need to do to create a social media plan, and I will use each of these same things for myself when I create my own independent, freelance social media plan.

Here’s a quick rundown:

Social audit

This is basically where you take a look at every single social channel that you own, or thost that your rbrand owns, and you analyze them, figure out what they’re doing right, what they’re doing wrong, what their followers are, and etcetera.

SWOT Analysis

“SWOT” is actually an acronym for “Strengths,” “Weaknesses,” “Opportunities,” and “Threats.” Basically, you look at how each of those apply to your own social media channels, and your own business goals.

Editorial Calendar

Believe it or not, most brands and agencies don’t post content all willy-nilly, whenever they feel, saying whatever they want, much like how regular people might do so on their own social media. In fact, agencies and brands have a schedule as to what content is going to go live, and when.

Goals

This is literally what you’re trying to accomplish with your social media, whether you’re trying to make sales, or if you’re trying to build awareness, or entertain your audience, or what have you. Just remember, everything you do is pretty much going to hinge on your goals. For instance:

Objectives

Now, goals are your overall, broad, big-picture things that you’re trying to accomplish. Your objectives are smaller, the milestones that you’re trying to accomplish. Your goal might be to “become the strongest leader in the field of social media communication,” and your objective would be something more specific, like, “increase awareness of x-brand by 200% in a year,” or something like that.

Tactics

Tactics are the specific things in a strategy that you’ll do in order to meet your objectives. A tactic might be something like, “create a hashtag that followers will use,” or, “respond to every mention,” or, “do more customer service,” or something. Hopefully that makes sense,

Now then, a good question might be, how could all of those bullet points apply to the event that’s listed above?

Well, we’ll explore that in a series of blog posts coming up; Each task will likely get their own dedicated blog post, so stay tuned.