Adding social media to your online marketing program is a process. This is my attempt at capturing the major steps and goals in a single slide. Stay social, stay focused, enjoy success.

1. Goal Setting
Essential to any program’s success is defining the user response you are trying to achieve. What do you want the web visitor to do?

2. Team Roles and Responsibilities
Social Media is a team sport. Everyone on the team needs to know their action items and take responsibility for the success or failure of their execution.

3. Personas
Knowing a little bit about your various visitors (their role, their goals, what kind of engagement you want with them) goes a long way towards designing the best program to attract and activate them.

4. Content Planning
Editorial calendars, publishing schedules, and even social network promotions need to be mapped out ahead of time.

5. Publishing
What’s the process for getting a new article published? Is there a review cycle? Who pushes the “publish” button? Who makes revisions once the post is published? Who responds to the comments and questions?

6. Analytics & Demographics
If you are not measuring your programs you are shooting in the dark. Google Analytics is free, set it up and learn what to watch for. Learn how to determine an “actionable metric” rather than just building reports. The demographics can feed into your personas for revision.

7. Mapping Activity to Goals
All “activity” is good. (Facebook likes, retweets, comments, questions) but unless the activity leads toward one of the goals it’s just activity. Make sure the actions you are taking are focused on the goals. And measure what’s working and change what is not working.

8. Revise and Repeat
The great thing about social media is the flexibility to try new things. If something is not performing, change it. Don’t wait through the weekend to see if the metric changes, change it now. A/B test a few ideas. Go with what works, kill what doesn’t. You can see how if you are not measuring the results these changes might be difficult.

The more laser-focused you are on your goals for social media, the more success you can have. If you optimize what works and kill what doesn’t you improve your opportunity for the win. And that’s the goal. Social can bring them to the table, but in the end it’s the WIN that matters, the close, the deal, that demonstrates the success of any program.

Know what’s working and do more of that.

John McElhenney — let’s connect online
@jmacofearth & LinkedIn