“Jane said you’re in social media. Is that, um, is that good?”

Everyone knows what social media is, kind of. They key focus often lies with community management, driving traffic and advertising. Oh, don’t forget content creation and aggregation. Plus working with influencers. Also campaign strategizing.

However, there has to be a common backbone to every piece of a Social Media (don’t say guru/ninja/maven) strategist’s position. Economics.

Every piece of planned content should start with:

• Who are you talking to?
• Where are they?
• What are they interested in?
• What are your goals?
• Why are they your goals?

Then you can delve into:

• What time are you posting?
• What are your audience doing at that time?
• What device are they using?
• Do they have time to give 1-word answers or can they engaging in a conversation?

Following the post:

• How did it perform?
• Did your audience engage with your post?
• What were the quality of their engagement? (Likes vs Comments vs Shares)
• What drove them to engage?

Social media is a fantastic platform for fast poll-taking, demographic reading and intel-gathering.

Twitter’s new Poll tool is particuarly useful as both an engagement driver and census-taker. Getting an audience to provide an answer to an open question can be hard, but taking a poll allows people to do what they love – catagorize themselves. If you ask someone about their favourite animal, they’ll look up, think for a moment scroll past as it’d take just too long to type ‘Dolphin’. However, if you ask – ‘Are you a cat person or dog person’, you’ll get more answers, defined to your two options with a opinions thrown in.

After a series of these, you can have a clear understanding of who you’re really talking to and why they’re listening to you in the first place.