A Social Media Marketing Checklist

7 Steps To Help Guide Social Media Planning

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Our commentary: Lee Odden, of Top Rank blog fame,  has pulled together a pretty detailed list covering his key areas to check when creating or refining a social media marketing plan - I thought it would be useful to our followers so here's a short summary plus a link to the full post:

• Organisation: Who is the senior sponsor that is going to give you support at board level, is there appetite in the organisation? Think through the human resources necessary, who are the key staff who'll benefit and how will the wider team be involved?
• Listening: Open your ears (via software) to general brand mentions, customers referencing you, what are prospects talking about in your market - and what's the competitor behaviour, are they being mentioned too.
• Goal Setting: This is going to be key when getting senior management buy in. How are you going to align to the business objectives? Ensuring that you benchmark and set realistic and measurable goals, a tight reporting process will be the key thing here.
• Audience selection: Know who it is that you are going to find and interact with online, understand who they are and their motivations and behaviours, what would they value from you?  Create simple personas to help inform everything that you do, especially for the detailed planning around strategy and tactics.
• Strategy: Lee presents three areas to consider here: what content can you commit to creating and distributing, and how you can leverage content generated as a result of sharing and interacting; are you leading or reacting to stories and will you 'launch' or phase into using social channels to gain engagement; what does your company stand for in the social web, your purpose and vision needs to be defined.
• Tactics (and tools): Identify the appropriate social channels and tools and a commit to using them, develop a discipline around processes that ensures things get done, and that there is co-ordination across the team.
• Measurement: Last and by no means least, be clear what tools, metrics, testing processes and reports will be necessary. I think this is relative to the scale of the campaign, processes and budget as to how much requires measurement and in turn the volume and relevance of reports to different business stakeholders.

Marketing implications: Lee makes a lot of good points. I feel that the key theme is resource planning, identifying those team members who are going to take responsibility for designing, delivering and measuring the return return from the social marketing that you do. Not a surprise given that social media marketing is people and process intensive. I do not feel that it's about doing social media marketing or not, but considering what's realistic for your company or brand at this time in terms of budget, resource, support and ROI pressures - then get on with it. I think this checklist helps answer the important questions.

Recommended link: Social Media Marketing Checklist