Week 14: Strategy

My overall aims for social media would be to spread interest in and awareness of the opportunity to increase resource-use efficiency in beer brewing to positively impact the planet and breweries’ long-term bottom lines while positioning my company as the ideal partner for breweries to contract with to achieve that double bottom line outcome.  With that in mind, I would probably want to approach my social media framework as follows…

Host a blog on our home page.  This would be the place where we show our expertise and contribute our own voice to the online conversation.  We would also invite guest bloggers with complementary perspectives, highlight relevant events, share videos (from our youtube channel), and more.  The blog would be our sort of home base.  Anything that we want to push through other channels could have its longer-version in the blog so people could go there for more information and it would be integrated into our company’s main site. We’d probably blog about once every two weeks to start.

We’d also use Facebook and Twitter in order to be where most of the people are.  Facebook would be used as a place to push out blogs as well as other content like photos, videos, posters, and other engaging media.  We would probably use time management strategies (like scheduling posts in Facebook) to set up about one Facebook post a day and then just let it ride unless we see something viral that we could share or comment on.  We’d probably use twitter as another place for pushing out content from our blog, but have that mostly as a place where we see what’s up and make comments or share most of the time.  Also we’d use Facebook and Twitter as ways to listen to the community.  I’d want to do something on Twitter about every day – at least every work day.  This we’d probably do real time since it would mostly be responding, retweeting and the like rather than set up a bunch on Monday to run through Friday, for example.

I would probably not start out with a newsletter, but I would definitely want to have a subscription feature for our blog so that people could get emails whenever we posted a new one.  If we have time for a newsletter, that is something I would consider adding in the future.

I mentioned a YouTube channel.  That seems like a good thing to have that we could just use whenever we have video.  I wouldn’t invest as much in creating videos as in some of the other efforts, but I would want to do some videos and those videos need to be hosted somewhere so they can be embedded in the web and easily shared.  Our YouTube channel would be that location.

Each of these tools I feel comfortable with and I feel like they can suit our company well.  Right now the company doesn’t exist.  At the start, if we start it, it will likely only be me and my husband.  For that reason I think we need to keep our social media efforts lean and targeted, but we should not skip them.  Social media is a marker of a serious business these days.  It is a way for us to prove engineering expertise, which is what we are selling.  That makes social media a pretty valuable strategy for us.  I would expect to spend about 8 hours a week on social media and I would expect my husband to spend about eight hours every two weeks working on the more in-depth blogs.  I can edit them and do most of the other stuff.  I’d need to also build up some engineering knowledge to spot good things to talk about online, and I’d need him to track what’s happening in social media and make sure we focus on the best content to share and respond to.  He loves social media, so hopefully it wouldn’t be too much of a burden to him as he works to get the actual engineering done.  J