Google+, LinkedIn, Facebook Timeline, Twitter, Pinterest … as the amount of social media tools increases it’s easy to feel as if your organization is missing out. While social media offers new and powerful opportunities for content distribution, engaging in conversations and increasing your online presence, you should be thinking about the impact it can have on your business. And that means developing a plan for using social media. But what does that entail?

Most social media efforts are successful when there are clear goals, efforts are integrated in the overarching communications strategy and when there is two-way engagement with fans, followers, bloggers, etc. This is an important distinction … read it again.

Social media = engagement. It does not equal one-way communication.

For a social media program to be successful, it’s important to understand the channels your key audiences use and integrate the channels that best meet your objectives with other, more traditional methods of communication.

For example, if your objective is to promote your products and services to consumers and you have great brand visuals, you might use Facebook and Pinterest to reach your audiences. If you want to connect with members or customers and participate in dialogue about industry trends, consider Twitter and blogging.

There is no perfect formula when choosing where to spend your time. Using our experience, plus industry best-practices, we help support clients in all levels of social media, from analytics integration and reporting, corporate account management, daily monitoring and engagement recommendations, employee training, and social media policy and strategy development.

As you begin thinking about your social media goals and how they integrate with your overall communications efforts, determine your objectives, strategies for meeting those objectives and key audiences. Once you’ve done this, you’re almost there.

Our next blog will address social media engagement. How do you currently engage on social media?