Social Media Strategy

A strategy defines guidelines and goals and gives the account purpose and direction.

Pre-Strategy Work

Before drafting your strategy, review your social media account and its purpose.

• Is it to engage? Encourage? Inform?
• Is there a larger, more established account that your unit could partner with to reach more people?
• Are you using or will you be using your account to the fullest in terms of content type, post frequency and messaging tone?
• Do you know who your message is for and why? Do you know your audience?
• Have your researched other land-grant institutions to see what they are doing on social media?

Once you answered those questions, you're ready to draft your social media strategy.

Goals and Success

Start by defining your mission, your audience and your goals.

• What are you trying to achieve with social media?
• How will your social media add to the Vandal experience?
• How do you measure success? Views? Posts? Shares?

Choose key goals (for your page and content you share) and ensure those goals align with the overall communication strategy and U of I brand. Next:

• Determine how progress is measured.
• Set key performance indicators and decide what is measured, and why and how often it is measured.
• Use the data to help drive future social media decisions and strategy updates.

Style, Voice and Content

Consistent brand messaging is important to keep our marketing cohesive. Before creating content, remember:

• Find your own version of U of I Explorer voice.
• Ensure that what you create adds to the overall Vandal experience.
• Set guidelines for tone (based on decisions you made about purpose in the pre-strategy work).

Implementation and Resourcing

There are items to think about before execution:

• Be realistic about who's going to implement your social media strategy, and when and how they're going to do it.
• Consider minimizing access to the account while putting this plan into action – this assures consistency of voice, tone, content and delivery until the account is well established.