It sounds simple doesnt it but, as with most things, there is no ‘one size fits all’ approach that we can use.  What we can do is offer some advice that will help and make the process easier and simpler to use.  It doesn’t matter if you run a business, football club, international body or pub team.  It’s about thinking clearly and understanding why you are doing it.  Here are my tips……

1.       Why

This should be the first questions that you ask yourself when thinking about starting on social media as a company/team/NGB.  What are your reasons for wanting to have an online presence, what makes it a must for you to be there?

If the answer is ‘because everyone else is’ or ‘it looks cool’ then please just take a step back for a moment and think.  My question to you would be, how can you measure if you are being successful if you don’t know what success is?

2.       How

Look at your resources, and this means human as well as financial.  Social media is often seen as being ‘free’ but it only is if you value your time at zero!  Do you really value your or a person in your businesses time as no cost?

Look at how much time you have to put into the project and if there is any money to put into the pot as well.  If you have some then maybe you can be a little more adventurous and great.  But if you don’t there is still the time it takes to update accounts, create content, etc and that needs to be taken into account.

3.       Where

We know that there are 500m+ people on Facebook and 150m ish people on Twitter but give it some thought before you jump onto the bandwagon.  Use some of the devices out there, both free and paid for (if you have some budget) such as Radian 6 (paid), Social Mention (free), Twitter Search, Facebook Search, Google (all free) to find out where the people are that are talking about you or what you do.

Also, if your market is in another territory (South America, China, Russia, SE Asia, etc) then do some research.  These require different platforms to use that perform a similar service but are specific to that region and thus you will need a presence there.

4.       What With

Only now do you decide what platforms to be on.  You know what you are there for, you know how much time and money you can dedicate to it and you know where your audience is.  All these things will help you decide on what tools to use.

At the end of the day they are exactly that, tools.  More weapons in your arsenal that can be used to perform your objectives.  Whether it is to deliver immediate news, connect with fans for a better experience, to answer queries, product development, sell more tickets, etc, etc. 

You can make a rational decision that doesn’t tie you to any one thing.  If Facebook goes the way of MySpace then you will have been listening and see where the conversations have shifted to and nimble enough to move with them.

This is where your resource allocation comes in as well as your listening.  You have to interact, connect with and be useful to your consumers.  You will have to test your efforts and see what works well as this varies with each audience.  Key is to be honest, personable, interesting and increase the consumer experience.

5.       Measure It

Once you have everything in place then you need to constantly measure your success.  Is it doing what you thought it would do, why not, what is the feedback.  Yes, use the ‘soft’ numbers you can get back such as followers, ReTweets, comments, etc but don’t forget to align this with other data.  such as Google Analytics (or your site traffic data) and sales data to go with the social media returns. 

ROI can mean many things to many people but without setting objectives you can’t have ROI.  The equation I always use is ‘what=success’?  Can you answer that in your own efforts?

If you set KPI’s along the way and adjust them as you move then when questions come from others about what is happening, why you are doing it, is it successful then you will have most of the answers (having all of them maybe a step too far).

If you can follow these basics I’m not promising you it will work but your chances of success will increase.  It may be that once you have gone through the first 2 or 3 checks you decide that it isn’t for you, you don’t have the resources or your customers simply aren’t using it (yet).

Here is a simple diagram summarising quickly how the social media cycle works;