Using social media as a business tool is best approached as a process rather than a strategy. However, you want your social media to be strategy-driven. In other words, you want to have a plan for managing your social media, aimed at a specific objective. To get started, be able to articulate a singular, well-defined reason for using social media – at least for the first three to six months. You can add more objectives later, but right out of the chute, it’s best to focus your efforts on one purpose.

Reasons for using social media

There are hundreds of reasons for using social media. Here are just a few:

• Engaging and energizing your current customer base
• Gaining visibility among potential new customers
• Reducing the expense of more costly, less effective traditional methods of marketing
• Establishing yourself as an expert in your field
• Being a resource of valuable information to your customers and potential customers

Don’t be tempted to target more than one objective. Fortunately, there is lots of overlap between objectives and you will likely achieve more than one at a time. But concentrate on only one for starters, and see where that takes you.

Identifying the right objective

The challenge, of course, is deciding on that first objective. One way you can do that is to look at your existing business strategy. One of the tools I use is the Components of Existing Business Strategy worksheet. It lists some common business functions that could benefit from the use of social media.

Go through the worksheet and think about each of the functions listed. You may have formal strategies for some of them; but even if you don’t, you certainly have some kind of plan or process for functions such as public relations, sales, and/or HR activities.  Customer Service is one example of a business function that can be enhanced by social media.

Once you’ve chosen a few functions that are relevant to your operations, think about the current costs associated with those functions. That factor may help you decide where you want to start making cost-saving adjustments by implementing social media tools.

At the end of the exercise, you should be able to define your social media objective in one simple sentence. Then, paste that into your timeline and get to work building the rest of the process that you’ll use to leverage the power of social media.

Let me know if you find this worksheet helpful in defining your singular objective for using social media. Better yet, share your objective in the comment section on this blog post. Thanks!