Maximize Your Social: A One-Stop Guide to Building a Social Media Strategy for Marketing and Business Success

Chapter 5

Core Elements and Concepts in Your Social Media Strategy

Based on my own social media strategy consulting experience, in order to create a comprehensive social media strategy, there are certain elements or concepts that must be in the actual document. Although there is general overlap among these concepts, they should be listed in the social media strategy individually to give the reader a better understanding of how they all work together. Note that the lengths of each of these sections will vary, with the channels section undoubtedly taking up the largest real estate.

BRANDING

The importance of extending branding guidelines to social media was discussed earlier in this book. Now branding guidelines must be brought in line with consideration to social media in the following areas:

• Naming
• Color scheme and imagery
• Voice

Naming

It goes without saying that every account in social media should be the same name as your company. However, there are three special circumstances to consider:

1. When the name you can insert into a username field is shorter than the name of your company, which is the case for many companies on Twitter. In this case, you need to prepare a shortened name for your company.

2. If you have extra real estate to use, utilize the name field of your social media account to add keywords to increase search engine optimization (SEO) and help others discover the account.

3. With an eye to the future, think about other naming schemes that may be necessary to ...