9 Steps to Your Social Strategy: Step 8 - List Your Influencers!

9 Steps to Your Social Strategy: Step 8 - List Your Influencers!

In the strategy process, you need to list the key Influencers or Giants in your community. Influencers or Giants are those who will help you distribute your message to their trusting followers. Influencers are critical in growing your followers. Quality Influencers will help your social trust factor and growth. A quality Influencer or giant is someone who is in a complementary, not competitive, business, and has the same target followers as you do.

Having a quality Giants retweet your tweets, share your Facebook Posts, or RePin your posts on Pinterest is the fastest and most effective way to grow. It is speaking to your target market through someone they already trust. For example, if your goal is to be recognized as a leader in leveraging social media for businesses, an industry giant you might look to would be Hootsuite. As their account strives to be a leader in social media news and tips. 

After the initial strategy exercise, your Social Media Coordinator should search online for your Influencers as part of their routine. Furthermore, individual departments may have their own unique Giants. Some might overlap. One approach to getting your Influencers’ attention is to mention them when appropriate in your posts. As well, an old fashion approach of picking up the phone and calling them is also effective, asking them if they would look for your posts, and share them when appropriate.  

Another creative approach to working with an Influencer is to invite them to your events, and ask them to tweet or do their voodoo while attending! I have heard successful stories of inviting Influencers to events or asking them to share or retweet in exchange for coupons or other VIP treatments.

Who:  Social Media ‘Giants’ have many quality followers.  They can be individuals with large followers, Business Associations, Media, Local Celebrities, Sports Groups, Vacations spots, industry experts. On the side of the giant's twitter page you will see a list of followers you follow already that also follow this giant. This is useful to make sure you are following the right giant.

What are they contributing:  Share or retweet & using consistent keywords if they are commenting on your behalf.

Why are they contributing:  Passion, sense of pride, desires to help drive your mandate, and growing their own business or cause.

Criteria:

Measure the impact of your Influencers/Giants

•       Increasing numbers of retweets & sharing.

•       Increasing use of your selected keywords by these Influencers.

•       Increasing number of quality visitors to your website from the Influencers’ shares or retweets. 

•       Mentions, posts, photos, and videos live from your events.

9 Steps to Your Social Strategy: Step 7 - Who Will be Responsible for Measuring and Coordinating Efforts?

9 Steps to Your Social Strategy: Step 7 - Who Will be Responsible for Measuring and Coordinating Efforts?

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The Social Media Co-ordinator

The social media coordinator essentially is the coordinating force behind implementing your social strategy. This person is essential to your social strategy, as this person is the organizational power behind it. The social media coordinator can be responsible for a multitude of different tasks including but not limited to: keeping content creators and ambassadors on track, editing and uploading pictures, Developing and launching Facebook ads and Google ads, creating and observing all posts, and helping contributors understand how to improve their posts. In essence, the social media coordinator will be responsible for implementing your social strategy effectively, from steps 1 through 9. 

Overall Social Media Co-ordinator:

The organization overall Social Media co-ordinator shares the strategy and protocols with each of the departmental Social Media co-ordinators.  They create the annual Social Media schedule. They also train the departmental Social Media co-ordinators as needed to manage their department’s schedule and contributors. 

Departmental Social Media Co-ordinator:

The departmental Social Media co-ordinator shares the strategy and protocols with each of their departmental contributors. They create their departmental annual Social Media schedule and keep their department contributors on track with the monthly schedule. 

Who: Your Organizational Staff.

What are they contributing: Ensuring the implementation of the Social Media Strategy & Action Plan.

Why are they contributing: To deliver on the Social Strategy Measures of Success.

Criteria: Expert on all Social Media platforms; training contributors and others on what to say and how to say it. Creating, sharing & monitoring the protocols.

Now that you have where the content is going to come from, and who is going to be responsible for it, try and implement these roles into your organization! 

9 Steps to Your Social Strategy: Step 6 - Where Will Your Material Come From?

9 Steps to Your Social Strategy: Step 6 - Where Will Your Material Come From?

Once you have listed the topics you are going to post, you should identify the experts that are both outside and inside of your organization, that have the best, most immediate experience access to your topics. They might be clients, staff, suppliers, industry experts, media, staff bloggers, or guest bloggers.

An excellent source for material is experts from outside of your organization who are not seen as competitors to your products or services, but are seen as someone who shares information on topics important to your online purpose. For example, if you are a theatre company, and you have certain performers coming to your theatre, you can share or retweet their appropriate posts to help grow the excitement toward them coming to your location, therefore creating buzz. Strive to spend 15 minutes daily, or at least once a week looking for sources of information.  If you are a retailer, often those who you buy you merchandise from have materials you can use to promote your products, however, remember, the best photos and posts are those right from your retail store, capturing the buzz in the store and the personalities of your staff.  

Another great tool for finding great content for your organization is through different news feeds. One of my favourite news feeds to use for this purpose is Mashable. This website finds the latest and trending internet stories for you, often times before they go viral. You can search stories based on your industry using the search tool, to find interesting articles to use on your social media!  


Contributors are typically subject-matter experts; your employees that have specific mandates or passions. As a part of your strategy, your next step will be to decide if your contributors are going to give their materials to your Social Media co-ordinator to post, or simply post it themselves

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The staff contributor is hands-on, feet-on-the-street, in the middle of the action; either with clients or creating your products. For their social efforts to be sustainable, it needs to be an extension of their current role.

What are they contributing:  They can be sharing updates, videos photos of experiences with clients or the creation of products.

Why are they contributing:  To help deliver on their departmental overall social goals.

Criteria:  They need to be trained with which voice to speak in, and what type of material to collect, and how to distribute it.

If they themselves are going to post, instead of giving the material to a central Social Media co-ordinator, they need to be aware of what the agreed to Measures of Success are.