“Social media strat­egy should tie to busi­ness and com­mu­ni­ca­tion strat­egy, rather than being based on the avail­able tools. But it is not pos­si­ble to develop a social media strat­egy with­out at least hav­ing an under­stand­ing of the var­i­ous tools that are avail­able, their func­tion­al­ity and pur­poses, and the kinds of audi­ences and con­ver­sa­tions for which they might be best suited.” - Joel Post­man, Prin­ci­pal Social­ized PR

I don’t usu­ally give a lot of time on this blog to social media tools, sim­ply because their cool­ness tends to dis­tract mar­keters from basic busi­ness objec­tives for their social media cam­paigns. The thing to always remem­ber is that social media is sim­ply a medium (albeit excit­ing & effec­tive) to help your com­pany meet it’s basic business/​revenue goals.

As Joel Post­man points out above, social media needs to tie into busi­ness & com­mu­ni­ca­tion strat­egy to be truly effec­tive for your com­pany. Social media tools should not be used for the express pur­pose of: being more trans­par­ent, being con­ver­sa­tional in the blo­gos­phere, online vis­i­bil­ity, or any other goal not specif­i­cally busi­ness process and/​or rev­enue related. Of course, by now, you know all of these things are impor­tant. Yet to focus on them inde­pen­dent of the rea­son you’re in busi­ness spells dis­as­ter. Your likely end goal should be to boost your over­all busi­ness rev­enue, stream­line your busi­ness process, etc. Strate­gic use of social media tools — with suc­cess met­rics attached to each imple­men­ta­tion — is one of the most solid ways for your com­pany to meet foun­da­tional busi­ness goals.

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