We are living through a transformational shift in the way the world communicates. The development of social platforms, like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest, have helped to inspire that change. The traffic on these platforms is huge - 700MM daily active users on Facebook[1] and 100MM daily active users on Twitter[2]. Pinterest is driving more referral traffic than LinkedIn, Twitter, Reddit & Google + combined[3]. This is obviously not a new trend; some brands like RedBull and CocaCola have been leveraging social platforms for years now. But, there are many brands that haven’t even begun to take advantage of what social media has to offer. For some, it’s the lack of resources. For others, it’s the lack of understanding of how social media can benefit them and drive key marketing objectives.Since 2007, we've spent spent years working with marketers in all phases of social media adoption. We've worked with brands who have active communities of 1MM+, and brands that are just starting to dip their toes in the social media water. Our goal at Socialtyze is to help marketers understand the true value of social media and to help them strategize and execute programs that align with their goals.Oftentimes, brands will try to cut straight to the social execution without doing any of the “pre-planning” work. It is important to remember that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to social marketing. Although we’ve seen success with specific ad types and engagement tactics across the board, we believe that it is extremely important to “pre-plan” for every objective. We suggest that brands follow this 5-step approach when determining their next move in the social space. You might be able to skip a few steps depending on how far along your brand is in the social media adoption process.

1. Identify Yourself.

The first thing you need to do as a brand, is figure out who you are. This probably sounds obvious or idealistic, but there are some brands out there that haven’t come to terms with what their value is to the consumer or how they truly differentiate from the competition. A few questions to ask yourself during this phase of the process:

• What industry are you in?
• How does your service or product benefit people or businesses?
• Who are your competitors?

2. Identify Your Customers.

The next step in your social planning is to identify your customers. Some social platforms make more sense for certain brands and certain industries. For example, if you’re in B2B, you probably want to make sure your leveraging LinkedIn. If you're a Fashion or Food brand, you want to make sure you’re on Pinterest. There might be reasons to leverage a wide variety of platforms, but you need to make sure your audience is there.A few questions to ask yourself during this phase of the process:

• Who are your current customers?
• Who are your prospects?
• What are their demographics/psychographics?
• What social platforms do they frequent?

If you don't know the answers to these questions, a partner like Socialtyze can help you to understand who your customers are and identify the best places to reach them.

3. Establish Your Goals.

What do you want to accomplish within social? This is a big question, because there are so many different ways to use social media – from gathering insights and crowd sourcing, to providing customer support, to improving the user experience with your brand across multiple platforms. Do you want to focus on just a few of these objectives or do you have the budget to do it all? Once you have a clear understanding of your goals, you can go about planning the right social strategy to meet those goals.4. Choose Your Buddies.

Sometimes it might make sense to choose your partners early on in the process, but in my opinion it’s best if you’ve answered steps 1-3 before trying to find the right partners and tools to work with. This is the phase in the process where you decide what you can handle internally and what you need to use your agencies and partners to handle for you. There are great resources out there to help with this, such as:

• Social listening tools to understand the conversation around your brand
• Posting and moderation tools
• Customer identification and insights tools
• Community management services
• Social strategy
• And more….

Take your time picking the right partners that you trust and think will keep you ahead of the game in social.

5. Plan, launch & measure.

Now that you’re done with the pre-planning, it’s time for the actual strategy and execution – getting out of the planning stage and into the nitty gritty. The key here is to launch, test and optimize based on what’s working best so that you can successfully reach your goals. Are you seeing a lift in engagement and positive sentiment after launching a certain type of offer on your Facebook page? Are your sales increasing month-over-month now that you have a consistent posting strategy? Take what’s working and expand upon it and drop what’s not. As Facebook would say – “Fail fast.” While we've tried to simplify the process of planning a social strategy, it’s still very complex. It’s not a one-size-fits-all approach and your strategy should be tailored based on your brand, industry, customers and goals. And, partners like Socialtyze are here to help make that process a little more simple. Interested in seeing what we can do for you? Email us! Cheristy@Socialtyze.com

[1] http://thenextweb.com/facebook/2013/07/24/facebook-users-q2-2013/

[2] http://thenextweb.com/twitter/2013/10/03/twitter-says-it-sees-215-million-monthly-active-users-100-million-daily-users-and-500-million-tweets-per-day/

[3] http://mashable.com/2013/10/15/pinterest-referral-traffic/