5 Things to Consider, from Audrey Carr’s Blog. Audrey Carr is a Senior Interactive Strategist & Planner at a digital marketing agency in Toronto.
Without getting into project specifics, here is Audrey Carr’s basic outline of useful things when planning and executing a community-based social media strategy.
Establish Your Goals. Carefully define how you plan to engage community participants. Think about the type of content you want community members to create, and the conversations you want to foster.
Define (and Find) Your Audience. Although general audience targeting is still helpful, it needs to be augmented with a bottom-up approach. Start by identifying similar topical or unofficial brand communities and learn to recognize their influential members.
Create Value, Not Noise. People use social platforms for communicating and fostering social connections, not to listen to advertising.
Seed and Facilitate The Conversation. One of the hardest aspects of starting an online campaign/community is attracting new members and motivating them to participate in an ongoing basis. Spend some time getting to the key influencers in related online communities and develop a personalized messaging strategy for informing them about your campaign.
Coordinate the overall experience. And finally,with so many moving parts, it’s easy to forget to consider the overall campaign experience from your users’ perspective, especially for integrated campaigns spanning across multiple online properties. Ensure you have at least one centralized location for aggregating top-rated community content, and ensure all social media properties contain links out and back to your central destination.
As always, there’s lots to think about, but I hope this outline serves as a useful starting place. Thanks Audrey!
