For-purpose Marketing 101

A handy guide to

Social Media

Planning

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According to a recent study by Digital Brand Expressions, 78% of companies say they are using social media, but only 41% say they have a strategic plan in place to guide such activity. This number is likely even lower for nonprofit and for-purpose organizations. In fact, nonprofitmarketingguide.com’s 2012 Nonprofit Communications Trends Report says that only 24% of nonprofit organizations have any kind of written and approved marketing or communications plan.

However, we believe that a strategic social media plan is absolutely essential to any for-purpose organization that wants to generate results through social media. Developing a plan based around a solid strategy ensures that you are directing your efforts toward the areas where they are most likely to generate results.

- How to conduct social research- How to turn the insights from your research into a social media strategy- How to determine which networks to use and how to use them- How to measure your social media efforts for impact and ROI

Join us on the next page to get started!

Why do we need a social media plan?

This guide is brought to you by:

If you have any questions about the material covered in this guide, please contact the author by emailing alyssa@prosperpr.com.

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Good research is truly essential to understanding where your brand stands in social media and where it should go. Luckily, research doesn’t have to be difficult or time-consuming. In fact, I like to break it down into three fairly simple steps:

1. Conduct a social media audit

Begin by identifying a short list of goals for your organization’s social media efforts. Put some serious thought into what you truly hope to get out of social media, and then quantify it. Write down a set of goals that are measurable, achievable and exist within a set timeframe.

Try it: Goal 1: _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Goal 2: _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Goal 3: _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

After your goals are established, it’s time to jump in to analyzing where you’re at and where you could be in social media. At Prosper Public Relations, we begin all of our client social media plans by doing a deep dive into the online world in which their brands exist. for some of our bigger clients, this can be a quite involved process, but if you have limited time or resources, you can simplify things.

We recommend you do the following to get a feel for where your brand stands in social media:

Part One: Research

Study your current efforts

Do you already have a Facebook page, Twitter account or other social media properties for your organization? Great. Study what you’re doing and make notes of what’s working and what’s not. What are you posting about? How often are you interacting and with whom? Are you using social media to drive business, donations, awareness, or something else entirely? How many fans or followers do you have? What do you think could be holding you back from getting more? See the form on page 5 to get started.

There many free tools you can use help with this process. We recommend:

Social Mention - this tool analyzes the strength, sentiment, passion and reach of your brand on social media, and shows you how many people are talking about your organization. To the right, you’ll find an example of the social mention analytics report for Argo Tea, a for-purpose business that sells sustainable ethically produced tea, and puts a strong focus on giving back to the community. We’ll use Argo Tea as an example throughout this guide.

Klout - this tool, which scores you based on your relative influence on the social web and is one of the most commonly cited metrics for identifying a successful social media presence.

Twittalyzer - this Twitter-specific tool does lots of cool things, like track a variety of Twitter stats over time and profile the user demographic that your

account interacts with. See below for an example of Twittalyzer’s output.

Argo Tea’s Social Mention Graph

Argo Tea’s Twittalyzer Data

Study your competitors and other key voices.

Our favorite tool for analyzing what the competition is doing on social media is Radian6. The powerful social media management tool allows you to pull a ton of statistics about your competition

Part One: Research

and the powerful voices in your niche, and even lets you see what share of voice you have in the conversation in comparison to other key players.

However, Radian6 requires a paid subscription that may not be in the budget for all organizations. In its place, we recommend simply seeking out the social media properties of key players in your industry or area of service and studying what they’re doing.

Are they posting frequently or infrequently? Do they have more fans/followers than you? How much engagement do they seem to be generating through their social channels? Use the worksheet on page 5 to record what you’re finding. I also like TweetLevel, a tool from Edelman that allows you to identify key voices in your niche through a topical search.

Here are the top users by share of voice on the topic “tea”:

Study your community

It’s important to get a feel for what people are talking about, sharing and commenting on in the community in which your organization exists. Are you a food bank looking to increase your social media presence? Then you’ll want to get a feel for what advocates for ending hunger are discussing. Do you sell ethically produced, fair trade handbags? It will be important to get a sense of what the fair trade clothing community likes to discuss. We like to use Radian6 here too, but TweetLevel can be a good stand-in. Search based on topics related to your niche, and then see the related phrases graph and word cloud to identify key topics of interest to your community.

Here’s the graph for the topic “tea”:

Part One: Research

While we do get a sense for the types of tea people are talking about most here, we don’t really get any insight into Argo Tea’s niche. For that, we’ll need to use a more specific topic phrase like “sustainable tea.”

This graph indicates that people in Argo Tea’s niche may also be interested in discussing broader topics like sustainable living and fair trade food. These findings could have a significant impact on the organization’s social media plan if they were developing one.

Now you try it. Use the form below to start taking notes about your current efforts, your competitors and your community. You’ll likely need some extra paper!

SOCIAL MEDIA AUDIT WORKSHEET

Current Efforts

Existing Channel 1: ____________________________ Purpose: _______________________________________________________________________________ What works: ____________________________________________________________________________ What doesn’t work: _____________________________________________________________________ Discussion topics: ______________________________________________________________________ Relationships: __________________________________________________________________________ Frequency of use: _______________________________________________________________________ Key numbers (e.g. followers): ___________________________________________________________ Ideas for improvement: _________________________________________________________________Repeat for other channels

Competitors

Competitor 1: _____________________________ Channels Used: _________________________________________________________________________ Discussion topics: ______________________________________________________________________ Relationships: __________________________________________________________________________ Frequency of use: _______________________________________________________________________ Key numbers (e.g. followers): ___________________________________________________________ Share of voice: __________________________________________________________________________Repeat for other competitors

Community

Community 1: _____________________________ Discussion topics: ______________________________________________________________________ Types of users: _________________________________________________________________________ Places they interact: __________________________________________________________________ Frequency of use: _______________________________________________________________________ Repeat for other communities

Part One: Research

2. Identify key findings

Your social media audit will likely identify tons of interesting information, but to make it useful, you’ll have to break that information down into the most important findings. Look at each of the key areas that you studied in the audit (your brand, your competitors/key voices and your community) and list the things that stood out most about each. Then, try to boil each list down into one key finding. Here is an example of what a set of key findings could look like for Argo Tea:

Brand Finding: There is a lot of room to improve our social media presence. We need to find a way to develop content that will drive more people to interact with our brand on social media.

Competitors/Key Voices Finding: We should carve out our own niche by interacting with key voices in the tea arena rather than trying to compete with brands we have classically thought of as our competitors (like Starbucks) via social media.

Community Finding: There are great opportunities to increase engagement from our target consumers by creating content that ties our brand to broader topics of sustainable living.

3. Develop a SWOT AnalysisAfter you’ve identified your three key findings, it should be fairly easy to develop a SWOT analysis, or list of the strengths weaknesses opportunities and threats related to your organization’s social media goals.

The areas of the SWOT analysis can be defined as follows:

Strengths: characteristics of your organization that could give you an advantage in social mediaWeaknesses: things you aren’t doing so great that place you at a disadvantage to othersOpportunities: factors that could impact your chances of success in social media (i.e. the opportunity to develop content about sustainable living)Threats: external elements that could limit your chances of success in social media

Use the worksheet below to identify your findings and develop your SWOT:

Part One: Research

KEY FINDINGS & SWOT WORKSHEETBrand Finding:______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Competitor/Key voice Finding:______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Community Finding______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Strengths______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Weaknesses______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Opportunities______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Threats____________________________________________________________________________________

People often confuse strategy with tactics, especially when it comes to social media. Let’s clear that up right off the bat. A strategy is a big, guiding idea about how to meet your goals. Tactics are the actions you take to deliver on that strategy. For the Argo Tea example we used in the last part of this series, the strategy might be something like “position Argo Tea as a key voice in conversation about sustainable living and eating.” Tactics may includethings like: create a regularly updated blog with original content and tips for living a sustainable life, share content related to sustainable living on Argo Tea’s Facebook and Twitter accounts, develop relationships with sustainable living coaches, food bloggers and sustainability advocates via Twitter, etc.

The list could go on, the important thing to realize is that developing a social media strategy is all about coming up with a big idea.

So how do you decide on a strategy to guide your social media efforts? Try these three steps:

1. Examine key findings.

Remember those key findings you uncovered about your brand, your competitors/key voices in your industry, and your community in the research phase of the social media planning process? It’s time to refer back and summarize all three of those key findings in one sentence. For Argo Tea, the key findings summary might look something like this:

“Argo Tea should develop content about sustainable living and interact with key voices in the sustainable living niche.

2. Combine key findings with strengths and opportunities.

Now, refer back to the SWOT analysis you conducted in the research phase, specifically to the strengths and opportunities sections. Then, write another

Part Two: Strategy

summary sentence that connects your key finding statement to your strengths and opportunities.

Here’s how this could look with the Argo Tea example:

“Take advantage of Argo Tea’s recognized position as a leader in sustainable food and beverage industry by creating, sharing and interacting around content about sustainable living, a topic that is of great interest to Argo’s target market.

3. Combine key findings and strengths/opportunities with your goals.

Finally, look back to the goals you set up in the research phase. How will the key finding about what you should do and the explanation of how that idea fits in with your strengths and opportunities meet your goals? Write one more sentence that pulls it all together. This final sentence should be a concise, clear statement of your social media strategy.

Here’s one more look at the Argo Tea example:

“Develop a loyal, devoted following for Argo Tea via social media and improve sales by taking advantage of the company’s recognized position as a leader in sustainable food and beverage industry and creating, sharing and interacting around content about sustainable living, a topic that is of great interest to Argo’s target market.”

Use the form on the right to develop your key finding statement, your strength and opportunity statement and your strategy

statement. The strategy statement will guide all your efforts from here on out, so make sure it’s on target.

STRATEGY WORKSHEET

Key findings summary:______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Strength and opportunity summary____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Strategy statement: ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Part Two: Strategy

The social media landscape is growing and changing all the time. Just when you think you’ve got your approach to social media down, a new platforms enters the scene, and it’s time to re-evaluate again. In an environment that is constantly in flux, it’s often difficult to wrap your head around which channels are best for your organization, and how they can be used to meet your goals. That’s why it’s important to have a tactical aspect to your social media plan that builds from the strategy we developed in part two. Here are the steps we recommend:

1. Identify key discussion topics

Does the social media strategy statement you developed in the last part of our series mention the topics you intend to build content around in social media? It should. Take a look back and then build a list of 10-15 key discussion topics that feed off of your strategy. If you need help getting started, the research you did in part one of this series on related phrases that people use

when discussing your topic is a great place to look. Here’s what the list could look like four our example organization Argo Tea:

Key discussion topic: sustainable living • Fair trade clothing• Green architecture and design• Mind + body exercise• Sustainable nutrition• Green energy• Ecotourism• Conservation• Public transportation• Composting and Recycling• Organic and sustainable recipes (some of

which could include Argo’s tea!)

2. Identify channels

Where will you spread your message? Where will you direct your limited time and resources? Which channels will do the most to help you meet your goals? These are difficult questions, but they must be answered if you hope to build a high impact social media presence. The short answer is

Part Three: Tactics

that you should focus on the channels on which your target spends the most time. There are sophisticated ways of determining this (Radian6 has a pretty slick tool) but our advice is to just get out there and talk to people who represent your target. Discuss how they’re spending their time online and see what you learn. A bit of searching and observation online could also uncover good insights about where to direct your efforts. After you’ve developed a shortlist of channels where your target is active, evaluate each one based on the following criteria:

• Does it allow us to deliver our message?• Is it aligned with our strategy?• Does it offer a unique benefit in

comparison to other social channels we’re considering?

• Will it allow us to add value to our stakeholders’ lives?

• Is the time and effort it requires worth the results?

• Do we know how to use it, or could we get help from someone who does?

If the answer to any of these questions is no, remove the channel you’re considering from your list. When you’re done, you’ll have a list that includes only the channels that are the best fit for your organization.

3. Make an action plan for each channel. Now its time to take that shortlist of channels you developed and decide how you’ll utilize each one. Use the chart in the right column to get started, and then repeat for each channel you plan to use.

ACTION PLAN WORKSHEET

Channel Name: list the channel name here__________________________________________Resource allocation: x hours day/week/month to be spent updating and maintaining the channel______________________________________Short term objective 1: List your first objective for this channel here (ex: grow number of Twitter followers)____________________________________________Action 1: list one action that will deliver on this objective and incorporates your key discussion topics (i.e. send two original tweets daily about sustainable nutrition)____________________________________________Action 2__________________________________________Action 3__________________________________________Short term objective 2__________________________________________Action 1__________________________________________Action 2__________________________________________Action 3__________________________________________Short term objective 3__________________________________________Action 1__________________________________________Action 2__________________________________________Action 3__________________________________________Key metrics: list metrics that will be used to measure success with this channel (i.e. number of RTs)Metric 1 __________________________________________Metric 2 __________________________________________Metric 3

Part Three: Tactics

Even the best social media strategy will fall short if you don’t have a plan in place to measure results. Every social media plan should conclude with a section on metrics and measurement. Here are three steps we suggest taking to develop yours:

1. Revisit your goals.

Remember that list of goals you developed in the research phase? Revisit it and re-state what you hope to achieve in a simple list.

Here’s what Argo Tea’s list might look like:

• Increase awareness of the Argo Tea brand• Drive preference for Argo among target

consumers• Build a community of Argo Tea advocates• Improve customer service• Increase sales

2. Decide what success looks like for each goal.

For each goal on your list, write a one sentence “success statement” that explains, in measurable and time-sensitive terms,

what it would look like to achieve your goal. Here’s an example:

Goal: Increase awareness of the Argo Tea brandSuccess Statement: Increase total high-value* fan/follower count by 25% and volume of positive brand mentions on social media by 35% in one year

Goal: Drive preference for Argo Tea among target consumersSuccess Statement: Increase share of voice in comparison to competitors by 20% in one year and increase brand preference in survey of targeted consumers by 10% in one year.Goal: Build a community of Argo Tea advocatesSuccess Statement: Develop a relationship with 10 high influence social media users Klout scores over 40 who share positive information about Argo Tea on at least three occasions over the next year.Goal: Improve customer serviceSuccess Statement: Improve average response time to all customer inquiries and complaints by 10 minutes in next 6 months. Increase sales: Increase sales by 3% over

Part Four: Metrics & Measurement

next year as a result of social media activity**

3. Determine how each success statement will be measured. With the multitude of social media analytics platforms on the market today, there is a tool for measuring just about any metric you can imagine, and many of them are free.

For the metrics we’ve established in our example, here are the tools we recommend:Fan/follower count: TwitterCounter for Twitter, built-in analytics pages or simple observation and documentation for other networksBrand mentions: Social Mention or Sprout SocialShare of voice: Social Mention with the Share of Voice Worksheet from Convince and Convert Influence: Klout and Social MentionResponse time: Radian6Sales: Surveys etc.

Note that while I’ve only listed Radian6 (our tool of choice) for measuring response time, it can also be used for most of the other metrics on this list, and many others. However, it requires a paid subscription.

Use the worksheet on the following page to get started on the metrics section of your plan.

METRICS AND MEASUREMENT WORKSHEET

Goal #1: Restate your first social media goal ____________________________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________________________________ a. Success Statement #1: State your success statement for goal #1. Make sure it’s quantifiable and time-sensitive ____________________________________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________________________________ b. Measurement Tactic #1: Summarize how you’ll measure success statement #1 _______________________________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________________________________ Goal #2: Restate your second social media goal ____________________________________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________________________________ a. Success Statement #2: ____________________________________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________________________________ b. Measurement Tactic #2: ____________________________________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________________________________ Repeat for each goal on your list.

Part Four: Metrics & Measurement

After you finish this worksheet, compile all the notes you’ve taken and lists you’ve made into some sort of organized document. It doesn’t need to be anything elaborate. A word document or simple keynote presentation should do the trick. Then give yourself a big pat on the back, because you’ve just completed your own comprehensive social media plan!

If you need more help with social media planning or execution, visit us at prosperpr.com, or contact our president by emailing alyssa@prosperpr.com.

Want more? Check out communicationwithacause.com for more for-purpose market-ing tips and tools.

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