After choosing the right mix of social channels for your business (refer: How to choose the right mix of social channels for your business?), comes the important part of any social media campaign – building the right social media strategy.
What is a Social Media Strategy?
A blueprint that shows how a company/brand should plan to use social media to help achieve its business objectives. It also throws a light on the exact steps that will be taken to achieve the goals.

What does a Social Media Strategy include?
A. An executive summary which briefly explains the key objectives and recommendations, without going into much detail.
B. A comprehensive analysis which shows the current strengths, weaknesses and problem areas that the strategy will focus upon.
C. The key objectives which are the business goals that the strategy aims to achieve
D. The actual strategy which consists of elaborate explanation about types of content, recommendations, content calendars, tactics and tricks.

What are the major steps to be followed when building a social media strategy?

Step 1: Laying the Concrete

A strategy should be treated as an AIR that free flows in the company rather than WATER stored that everyone needs to fetch. A cross-functional team will contribute diversely rather than a single department owning it.
Open brainstorming sessions with different logical perspectives contribute immensely in building a robust strategy.

Step 2: Keeping your ears open

Broadening your social listening beyond your brand name is one way you can listen clear and deep what your customers and competitors are trying to convey you by their actions and behavior.
Listening is an old advice but cannot be ignored however new the circumstances might be.

Step 3: Pre-defining the goals

Why do you want to use social media for? Brand awareness? Lead Generation? Sales? Branding? Loyalty and retention? Revenue?
Social media does help achieve multiple things but pre-defining the goals help the strategy produce the best results.

Step 4: Choosing the success metrics

Selection of success metrics largely depends on the business goals pre-defined in the strategy. Number of likes, engagement, traffic, ROI, revenue. These key measures help you gauge the effectiveness of your strategy. Monitoring the measures and optimizing the strategy based on their response is a vital step of any social media campaign.

Step 5: Understanding the behavior of the target audience

Every brand has a niche audience. Understanding their behavior to the current market trends is one cautious step towards building an effective strategy. The strategy needs to address and nurture the characteristics of brand’s current as well as prospective customers. Understanding the volatile nature of the market, a strategy should be impactful and influence the minds of the audience uniquely.

Step 6: Discovering and polishing the brand’s USP

What do you want your brand to be known for? Which is the thing that will make your brand stand out among the rest? How are you planning to appeal to the heart of your audience?
When Bisleri replaces the word “water” and Xerox becomes the common man’s interpretation to “photocopy”, you know how deep the brand is rooted in the minds of its loyal audience.

Step 7: Humanizing your brand

People befriend each other and not the machines. A brand whether personal or company, needs to humanize and behave like a person. The invention of robots (machine with a human appeal), showcasing of aliens in movies in a manner similar to human physiology are all instances that show brand’s inclinations towards humanizing their products and ensuring they have huge mass appeal. Social media is no different! Brands need to be friendly, open and easily accessible the way real friends are!

Step 8: Defining the milestones

Setting the milestones with clear objectives and time duration is another important task that helps the brand to monitor its progress time-to-time.
Monthly, quarterly, half-yearly and annual milestones are also the best way to generate a repository of your ideas. These ideas can be referred later for planning the campaigns, contest or any other event in future.

Once all the steps are done, a plan for each channel can be created individually based on the facilities provided by the channel. Every channel can be utilized for varied purposes. The best choice of channels, activities, frequency and time of publishing the content can be done depending on the business goals.

The above steps can be further categorized elaborately for major brands but the thought process remains the same.

Establishing a brand with systematic planning and in-depth knowledge of social media channels is the basic requirement. If this is achieved, I am sure devising a strategy would be easy.