You realized your company needs to get involved in Social Media, but don’t know how to implement it? Follow these four proven steps to create your Social Media plan:

1. Define the engagement type of your customers
   It is crucial to know what your customers are already doing– your strategy should leverage this activity. Define whether they tend to be creators (of content), critics (posting ratings, reviews, etc.), collectors (of information), joiners (of networking sites), spectators (reading blogs, listening podcasts, etc) or are simply inactive. A helpful tool for this assessment can be found here.
2. Define your Social Media goal
   Your company can pursue five basic goals with social media:
   • Listen: The use of Social Media for research and better understanding of your customers
   • Talk: The use of Social Media to extend the existing digital marketing spreading messages about your company
   • Energize: The use of Social Media to fuel viral marketing via your most engaged customers
   • Support: The use of Social Media to enable customers to support each other
   • Embrace: The use of Social Media to crowd-source your product/service development
3. Define your Social Media strategy
   Basically the Social Media strategy should provide an answer to the questions: a) how will you engage your customers? and b) how will this engagement grow over time? Keep always in mind that the Social Media strategy should align the type of engagement of your customers with your company’s Social Media goal. For example you don’t want to build a social media strategy to enable customers to support each other (Support Goal) only to find out that your customers are more like to join social networks like Facebook (joiners group).
4. Define your Social Media platform/technology
   Last but not least, it is relatively easy to decide on the appropriate technology (blogs, wikis, widgets, social networks, etc.) once you defined the engagement type of your customers, your social media goals and strategy.