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Social Media Strategy Template

October 9, 2012 Martin Sickafoose Draft document

The purpose of this template is to assist departments and units with developing a robust and clearly articulated social media strategy.

Create A Social Media Strategy

1. Define your objectives: List the primary objectives you hope to accomplish with the creation of the your social media presence. (Are you trying to highlight news stories, staff accomplishments or promote events?) Objective 1: Objective 2: Objective 3:

2. Define your audience: Whom are you trying to reach through social media? Connect your audience with your goals to ensure youre engaging the best stakeholders to meet your community engagement objectives. Description Audience 1:

Audience 2: Audience 3:

3. Content Strategy: From where are you going to pull content? Is it content that has been created within your area or from an outside source? Is the content appropriate, based on your objectives and audiences? Content Sources Website Newsroom Events Print Video Other Media Description

4. Networks: Identify the specific social media networks you will use to promote stories and engage with your audience. Tool Yes/No Facebook Twitter LinkedIn YouTube Google+ Pinterest Instagram/ Flickr Other

5. Staff and Training As you define the strategy for your social media presences, you will need to dedicate staff resources to maintain your presence and your content. It is necessary to post on a consistent basis and monitor the posts, and comments. Do you have staff dedicated to social media? How many hours per week can they dedicate? Have they been trained on how to post, and oversee each social media presence you have?

For additional discussion or clarification, please contact Martin Sickafoose or Christy Jones within the Office of Marketing and Media, who can share resources required to manage central social media efforts, and examples from selected units experiencing success.

6.

Monitoring, and moderating, comments: Successful social media engagement is predicated on interaction. Comments are a main source of that interaction. By accepting comments on your site, you encourage audience participation and interaction, thus making your site more appealing and valuable. However, not all audience action is positive and moderation is necessary to protect your site from inappropriate comments. Comments containing vulgarity, attacks on any individual or group and spam should not be tolerated. How will you monitor comments? Are you staffed appropriately to handle?

7.

Measuring Success: Determine how you plan to measure your sites success. Each social network has its own reporting tools, but look for other tangible measurements such as increased web traffic or posted stories.

Identify specific metrics will you be viewing to determine your social media success (e.g. fan/ follower count or engagement)? What will determine a successful presence for your group?

8. Approval Per the University Social Media Policy you must secure the approval of the appropriate administrative leader in your college, school, department or group (e.g., vice president, vice chancellor, vice provost, dean, etc.) and you must notify the appropriate Campus Authority, designated in the University Social Media Policy, of your plans. Be sure to share this strategy document and discuss your plans for a social media presence with your group.

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