Create a Social Networking Strategy

The awesome Lisa McNeill from Ignite Social Media wrote a great post about how to develop a social networking strategy.  To do so, she asks the following questions:

1) What networks are my target audiences interacting within?
2) What is the level of interaction my target audience is having within these networks?
3) What conversations already exist about our company? Within which networks?
4) What type of interactions do users have within each network?
5) What are other brands doing?

To me, all of these seem right on the money.

For instance, let’s say we are a hip new ringtone company targeting an audience between 16-23.  A large portion of this demographic would be found on Myspace.  Myspace users are notorious for heavily customizing their pages and they frequently interact with the network.

There may or may not be conversation about our brand – if not, no fret.  That’s why we’re developing this strategy!

Users either write private messages back and forth or post “comments” on each others pages.  How about introducing an application that allows users to send song clips to each others profiles?  We could brand it with our logo and a link to our ringtone site and watch the users pour in.  Or perhaps we could give users an incentive to place a banner on their Myspace page – maybe a free ringtone?

Lastly, an important thing to do would be to watch what other brands are doing, particularly our ringtone competitors.  If they come out with a cool new way to let users interact with their brand, we would have to one-up them, so to speak.  We can’t afford to let other companies have the “cooler” brand or else we risk losing our customers.

All in all, these were great points made by Lisa and I encourage you to head over and check out her full post as well as the discussion in the comments.  This information will be extremely valuable to you in your quest to create a social networking strategy.