Before beginning a social media campaign, there are mundane, yet critical steps to accomplish before creating your first content. So let's get started.
Planning
1. What are you trying to promote?
It seems obvious, but it might not. You're about to embark on a long-term strategy that's going to take time and energy, not just today, but for the foreseeable future. A campaign can be structured around
- you
- your business
- a product or product line
- an event
- a cause
You might choose to develop a 'one size fits all' strategy to accomplish all of the above, or different campaigns to focus on one specific interest. In either case, before setting out on this venture decide on a point of view, whether specific like a particular product or general like your company or organization and use that point of view to guide your decisions going forward.
2. Branding and Identity
What is your brand? If you haven't done so already, name it. Gather together all the assets you have so far, name, logo, images, mission, description, etc. Whatever you already have and are using should be available to be adapted to your chosen social media channels.
When thinking about identity, you want to choose what your campaign should be called. This unique name will ideally be used for all your online assets: website, Facebook page, Twitter account, email, and so on. Be prepared to have several choices. The web is global and your first choice might already be taken.
3. Research
Now that you know what you are promoting, and by what name it should be called, you need to make sure that someone else hasn't gotten there first. So checking all the channels that you are likely to want to use is the next step:
- If you haven't registered a website with this name yet, make sure that you can.
- For each social media outlet, make sure the name is not already taken.
- Make sure the name is available for utility accounts, like gmail.
Chances are that your first choice of names will not be available in all channels. Move onto your second choice (or third or fourth) and check that. You might have to get creative here, but do try to come up with a name that is as closely related to your brand and what you are trying to promote as possible.
next steps: Getting Organized
