Planning your social media activity outlines steps to take a strategic approach to social media use for an institution. It recommends developing measurable SMART objectives for what you want to achieve through social media. It also suggests creating an editorial calendar to plan content posting across social media platforms and regularly reviewing analytics to evaluate what content and approaches are most effective. The document stresses getting started on the key platforms where your target audience engages and involving relevant parties within the institution.

1. Planning your social media
activity
( Ref http://sarah-
stewart.blogspot.co.uk)

2. Be strategic
• Tend to be haphazard about our social media
activities.
• Need to have a policy to guide the institution

3. Develop outcomes
• Measureable. SMART objectives?
• What do you want to achieve? Increase
number of ‘likes’ on Facebook? Or number of
‘followers?’
• Will this have a real effect on the institution?
Better survey results, better engagement with
students? Better exam results? More jobs for
our students?

4. Plan your activity
• Consider an editorial calendar which will
identify when and where to post content, and
who will do it
• https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key
=0AjhtZYpTxYzhdFE0bV9FcTlEYlJZSm01TEVoc
mNlR3c#gid=1

5. Regular review and evaluation
• Maybe pay more attention to Facebook
comments to see what does and does not
work.

6. Get started and get everybody
involved
• Before you get started, it's important to find
out where your audience is and use the
appropriate tools to reach them. It's no good
the UWS spending all its resources on Twitter
when the majority of students can be found
on Facebook