A Guide to Social Media Propagation and Planning – Part 2

Any digital strategist or planner worth their salt, needs to have an adaptable framework with which creative ideas can sit in. In this post I’m going to outline my framework and techniques that I’ve used when planning social media engagement.

Framework

One of the frustrating experiences within integrated agencies is that the digital space is often considered an after thought to be grafted later on down the process. This is wrong, wrong wrong. Just as traditional planners are drafted in at the beginning of a campaign, there is real value is bringing to getting a digital strategist / planner involved from day one to flesh out the landscape.

During the planning stage the following questions are invaluable in the execution of any digital or social media seeding strategy:

1. What are the goals and objectives of the campaign? Without a common goal and objective that’s clear, concise and understood by all can you have success
2. Who is your target audience? Here a planner needs to get really into quantitative and qualitative data to understand who the audience is and where they are located online. You can segment audiences behaviour based upon their social profile, the digital channels they inhabit and the interactions they perform in those channels.
3. Getting people to participate?  What are the motivations that compel people to interact on online? Is it self-actualisation, altruism, clarification of status? It’s around these considerations that tangible incentives and triggers need to be established that can influence audience behaviour. {insert pyramid]
4. Reducing the barriers for participation is key after researching the audiences key motivations. You can come up with the most brilliant campaign idea but if the user experience is bad or the build poorly executed then success will be hard to attain. Therefore consider what the functional needs of the audience are in each digital channel.
5. Making the experience as frictionless as possible needs to be another consideration. I recently worked on a campaign where the existing signup process took a good 3-4 minutes to complete. Looking at making the most effective and simple process for people to engage with a site or campaign is another key consideration.
6. What creative assets do you have at your disposal? If you have existing assets the first thing to do is to perform an audit to see if they fit with the creative idea. Discard those creative assets that are poor quality or no longer relevant for the campaign. My advice is do involve the client in the audit process to help facilitate the process
7. Ask yourself and others the question why would any one share? If you have access to research groups I would actively encourage anybody to ask their chosen audience what compels them to share online? (As a side note I asked a research group a few weeks ago if they created anything online? This was met with a resounding no. But when I rephrased the question do you upload and share photo’s, links, and video? It was an equivocal yes!)
8. Determine your communication plan or seeding strategy. Borrowing from Dan Zarella’s presentation on The Science of Timing he comes up with a number of stats. Retweets work best late in the day and in the week; weekends are best for Facebook sharing; Experiment with emails during the weekend; send emails early in the morning; blog on the weekend for comments; blog early in the morning for links; and blog more frequently
9. Align KPI’s that are relevant to the goals and objectives of the campaign. To aid the process walk through the user journeys to determine the key interactions and don’t fudge the importance of ROI.

The social channels are awash with the ongoing debate of Social Media ROI and whether it’s relevant. To my mind, it’s easier to dismiss something as being irrelevant without putting in the effort to understand the dynamics. The vast majority of people who call themselves social media ninja’s / guru’s etc have a vested interest in continuing to keep social media wrapped up in fuzzy thinking.

To my mind the genuine thought leaders in social media are those willing to apply qualitative and quantitative insight into our online social interactions and to put themselves under the microscope of critical thought.