Do a Social Media Business Plan

What’s a social media business plan? It’s not a business plan document. It’s not about text. It defines specific strategy, tactics, and actions to be taken to develop social media power to achieve business goals.
This is my seven-step suggestion for making your own social media business plan. And, for the record, this is what we can do for you as a social media plan we develop, customized, for your business. Yes, we can do it for you. But first, we can tell you how to do it for yourself. My apologies for a longer-than-usual post, but it’s the key elements of the social media business plan.

1. Business Objectives: Make it concrete and measurable. Look towards ROI. What’s the business objective?
2. Market-defining story: Who are you trying to reach? What type of people? Do they live in a certain place? Are they a gender, economic level, education level, or some kind of affinity group like fans of a sports team or a certain make of car? Are they homeowners? Renters? Students? People who eat at one kind of restaurant or another? Tennis players, bikers, cat lovers? This is not numbers. It’s a description of people.
3. Content to promote: Describe the key content you are curating to help your target market with useful and interesting information.
4. Content to avoid: This is ideas you disagree with, that are not useful to your target audience, misconceptions and misunderstandings, content that a casual observer might think fits in your area but doesn’t match your preferences, your opinions, your expert advice.
5. Friends: list the friends and allies you work with, companies that you co-market with, manufacturers whose products you sell, bloggers whose content you like and trust, etc.
6. Platforms: What content do you put onto what social media sites and platforms, and why. You should be strategic. Some types of content, some target markets, some businesses are better suited for one platform than another. In most cases businesses should have a minimum presence on all five platforms, but focus most effort on one or two.
7. Metrics for tracking: Go back to your business objectives and find the performance metrics you can track. That might be sales, leads, web traffic, sign-ups, store traffic, support incidents, likes, followers, Klout score, or whatever. Make sure it’s concrete and measurable. The test is whether you can use it to determine social media ROI later.