As most small businesses begin to dip their toes into the social media waters, the shear number of social networking websites and online tools can be very intimidating, even crippling. And it certainly doesn’t help that new social tools are being introduced everyday. To help small businesses navigate these waters, we’ve developed a pretty simple, social media strategy process that involves three main steps.

1. Goal Setting – What do you want this social media effort to achieve?

Before we decide which tools to implement, every company needs to figure out what their main goal will be and what strategies would be best to achieve that goal.

• More sales?
• Get some attention?
• Improved customer service?
• Improved customer loyalty?
• Reputation monitoring?
• Just increase your presence online?

2. Strategy Development

With your main goal defined, specific strategies can be determined by identifying a few key elements. When presenting to groups, I’ve found that a fishing analogy works well to explain this:

• Identify your fish = profile your ideal target buyers and the people, groups and mediums that influence them.
• Where are your fish/influencers swimming (social networking sites, forums, blogs, etc.)? This is where a lot of companies get tripped up. Certainly sites like Facebook and Twitter get a lot of press, but that doesn’t mean that those should be your focus. Based on your industry, there may be some smaller, niche social sites, forums or blogs that would be much more productive fishing holes. But here’s the fail-safe approach…If you don’t know, ASK YOUR CUSTOMERS! Find out in which sites their spending time. Ask them which tools they typically use to learn about products and services.
• What type of bait (content) will they find valuable? – This is your content strategy. What topics will resonate with your buyers? What problems do your products/services solve? Which content formats (written, video, audio, etc.) will ensure your message gets delivered?

3. Monitoring the Success of Your Efforts

Once your strategy has been developed and implemented, you need to pay attention to the customer engagement that is taking place surrounding your presence, as well as monitoring your analytics data to determine which types of content/topics are getting attention and which social media ponds are getting the most bites.

You may find that you’re only getting bites with certain content topics or in a few social media ponds, but at least you’re now aware and can hone your content strategy and focus your time on your most productive fishing holes.