Before diving head first into social media and opening conversations on your site, we feel that it is important for you to create a strategic plan, that will give you attainable goals and allow you to successfully implement Social Media applications on your site.

Do Your Research.

• Know your audience. Know who they are, where they are online and what they are looking for on your site. Listen to conversations that are already taking place on other social media platforms. What are these conversations about and what types of information are they looking for online? How and where are they finding it?
• How do you plan on providing them with the information that they want or the types of conversations that they want to participate in?
• Take stock in what your competitors are doing. You already know who they are, but what are they doing online that you could be doing? Are they using social media to reach their (and your) audience? Are they being successful in given your audience what they want? If so, how can you do it better?

Define Your Goals.

• It is nearly impossible to measure success without first defining your goals. You need to know what you hope to get out of social media, before you know what steps to take.
• By defining a solid set of objectives, this will help define your social media strategy.

Develop a Strategic Message and Method.

• While Traditional advertising campaigns focus communicating a strong branding message, social media can have a little more flexibility, allowing you to be less traditional.
• Social media is about real conversations and it is impossible to have this dialogue if you are constantly worried that the conversation might stray off track.
• Stay focused on the purpose of that conversation, on the goals that you defined in your social media strategy.
• When presenting your brand online, keep your audience in mind, who is looking for your information and how they are looking for it. Are they searching Google or Web MD for health information or are they having conversations in Twitter streams or Facebook newsfeeds? The message you use will determine if and where they find you.

Measure and Evaluate Results.

• Social media is still relatively new, so often times you will have to adjust your strategic plan, based on results of your efforts.
• Have you met your initial goals? Do you need to reevaluate those goals and set different ones? Of course, meeting and exceeding goals makes everybody in your organization happy, but does that mean that you could have done better?