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Social Media Strategy – template
This guide covers all the elements necessary for pulling together your strategy such as:
setting objectives, agreeing on principles, developing messages and branding,
prioritising audiences, choosing channels and platforms, planning activities, estimating
time, estimating budget and evaluating success.
1. Objectives of Social Media Campaign
A very a short summary/statement of the programme/campaign
You do not need to restate the full objectives of the programme itself. It is important to
remember that we are already aware of these. This should be the publicity 'pitch' for the
programme – concise, clear, engaging and user friendly.
2. Communications objectives, principles and key messages
A clear detailed statement of the objectives in communicating the principles underpinning this
strategy and your key messages. These should be aligned with the objectives of the
programme/campaign.
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3. Key Audiences
Who are you communicating with – a detailed description of your key audience and target
user groups. What are your priorities? Include what they already may know about you. What
do you think they should know? And do break down the users into sub-categories and add
engagement already made, if any on current social networks.
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4. Target audience ranked by
importance
Preferred/appropriate channel of
communication
How are you going to communicate, what is the most appropriate channel – blogging, social
networks, microblogging, photo-sharing, video-sharing, mobile networks, gaming platforms.
Consider offline ways you may want to engage as well: a newsletter, a large conference,
networking lunch, workshop, an evening outreach reception, promotional literature, regional
seminars?
You will probably have several channels that are appropriate
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5. Achieving your objectives – working project plan
Full details of all the relevant communications activities developed into a working project plan
with deadlines and responsibilities. Remember to include key milestones and review dates,
think carefully about cost, include staff and consultants, also how will you evaluate success?
Below are some suggested groupings, the table is led by activity but you may well want to
have one for each year of activity.
Social Media Communications plans are living documents and will need regular reviewing
and updating.
Activity Budget
/resources
Deadline/timeframe Success criteria
Identity/Branding
Subtotal
Internal
communication
Subtotal
Media relations
Subtotal
Marketing
Subtotal
Publicity materials
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Subtotal
Events
Subtotal
Website design
Subtotal
Total
6. Evaluating Success
How will you know if you have succeeded and met your objectives? How are you going to
evaluate your success, what performance indicators and evaluating measures will you use.
Break it up into quantitative (eg: Page views, Number of comments, Downloads, Followers,
Likes, Embeds, Mentions, PTAT, Number of RT, savings in support costs) or
qualitative: (Were comments, positive/negative/neutral? Did we learn something about our
customers that we didn’t know before? Did our customers learn something about us?
Were we able to engage our customers in new conversations?)
Day/Week/Month Platform 1 Platform 2 Platform 3 Platform 4
Pageviews
Unique Visitors
Average timespent
No. of Downloads
No. of Embeds
No. of Comments
No. of Followers
No. of Following
No. of Fans
No. of Likes
No. of ReTweets
No. of Favourites
PTAT
Engagement rate