Misleading informations about social media strategy development

social media strategy development and misleading informations in books and google.

Since even industry giants and reference book authors are not immune to the spread of misleading content for social media strategy development, here is another short, quickly put-together PDF that addresses the problem and provides a solution.

Measures instead of social media strategy

This recommendation is misleading because it leads to measures rather than strategies.

This kind of procedure is far from leading to a strategy. It doesn’t even contains the necessairy elements that defines strategy. Before we have a closer look we remember the difference between measures and strategies.

Strategy

  • Strategies are decisions about which potential a company uses and in which way and which it does not.
  • So social media strategies are about
  • the performance potential of social media and how the company wants to use this potential.
  • the benefits of social media for the business model and what benefits the company focuses its resources on.
  • the competitive situation and how the company wants to master it successfully.

Strategies then lead to the appropriate measures.

Measure

In our measures we describe how we want to achieve a specific goal.

For example, we define

  • which content
  • we want to use on which social media channels
  • in which content formats.

Measures are the children of strategy. 

Unfortunately, most measures in social media are orphans because they do not come from a social media strategy.

Wilfried Schock

This misleading recommendation is damaging.

Reader

When procedures are communicated in specialist books and a large echo on Google repeats the same recommendations, the readers run the risk of actually applying them.

In doing so,

  • they waste company resources.
  • forego success for the company.
  • make competency deficits obvious among colleagues and managers with strategic competence.

Service Provider

Even if not everyone who recommends this approach is aware of its weaknesses and problems,

  • their own strategic competence is clearly called into question for all those who are better informed.
  • this damages the reputation of their own company and of themselves.

How a social media strategy ist developed in a serious and practical way.

Strategy is not one of the easiest tasks. Even if using social media seems “child’s play”, developing a social media strategy is anything but.
Ultimately, the various potentials must be understood and applied.

Even serious strategy development involves many steps through a complex process of information gathering, information evaluation, development of strategies and their evaluation and a multitude of decisions in order to do justice to what strategies are.
The decision on how to use company resources most economically and effectively, i.e. an “economy of means”.

Below are the individual stages of a social media strategy development

  1. You have to know the performance potential that social media has for companies. This is an essential requirement that must be given. The performance potential of social media is not identical to the performance potential of social media platforms. It is based on what the individual usage formats such as communities, audiences, networks or mixed forms of social media can achieve for companies.
  2. You use this knowledge and the company’s business model to derive the fundamentally possible benefits of social media for the company. Social media affects the entire company. A social media strategy should take this into account and support the company’s business model instead of just serving one functional area. Otherwise, the strategy will be of much less use to the company. And the company runs the risk of getting bogged down in many isolated solutions in social media. Therefore, knowledge of the company’s business model is necessary for strategy development.
  3. You examine the competitive situation in social media for the fields that are particularly relevant for the company and use the competitive situation to check whether this competition can be overcome using the company’s resources. We know the benefits we can achieve with social media for the business model as a whole and its individual modules. Now we take into account the competitive situation and the company’s resources and identify which benefits we can most easily achieve for the company. This gives us the overview – the big picture – that allows us to develop a promising strategy in social media that offers the company the best possible benefit and is feasible with the available resources.
  4. You define the most interesting strategy versions according to criteria such as chances of success, economic significance of the respective benefits, etc. From the overview of the possible benefits of social media and their respective priorities, the competitive situation and the resources, various sensible strategy versions inevitably arise – simply because of the priorities of the business model and the requirements of the competitive situation in social media.
  5. You define the individual content for the most relevant strategy and evaluate the quality of the strategy versions.Strategy versions can be evaluated quite pragmatically based on the benefits that can be achieved in a strategy version and the risks of the strategy in competition or the complexity of a strategy design.
  6. You present the best strategy versions for decision-making. The decision as to which social media strategy will then be implemented is necessarily a strategy of company management because it will have a direct impact on the business model.
  7. You implement the final strategy and manage its results, timeliness and impact. After the decision on the final social media strategy, strategy management begins, in which we control the implementation of the strategy, monitor its assumptions and requirements and, if necessary, adapt or replace the strategy.

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