Steps for a Successful Social Media Community

Setting goals, creating realistic plans and strategies, defining the audience and platform to use to meet your objectives, and determining how to measure results are  critical requirements for success in  creating a vibrant social media community.

“ You cannot engage effectively in social media without these steps; otherwise your efforts will lead to failure,” said  Mr. Benjamin Dalmulder,, Team Manager for Digital Analytics and Search Engine Optimisation, and Ms Katarina Gomes, digital strategist, both of RNW Netherlands, during the regional Workshop on Online and Social Media Analytics held Monday in Incheon, South Korea. Both served as consultant for the project organised by AIBD and supported by RNW, Netherlands.

Setting goals, creating realistic plans and strategies, defining the audience and platform to use to meet your objectives, and determining how to measure results are  critical requirements for success in  creating a vibrant social media community.

“ You cannot engage effectively in social media without these steps; otherwise your efforts will lead to failure,” said  Mr. Benjamin Dalmulder,, Team Manager for Digital Analytics and Search Engine Optimisation, and Ms Katarina Gomes, digital strategist, both of RNW Netherlands, during the regional Workshop on Online and Social Media Analytics held Monday in Incheon, South Korea. Both served as consultant for the project organised by AIBD and supported by RNW, Netherlands.

In setting goals, they urged broadcast companies and newsrooms to adopt the ‘SMART’  approach. ’S’ means that goals must be specific, simple and well-defined. ‘M’ requires that goals must be measurable and online tools are available for this purpose. ‘A’   for attainable demands that goals be realistic to meet targets. ‘R’ calls for goals to be realistic and relevant, and ’T’ requires goals to be time-bound, setting a realistic timeframe for meeting your goals.

Ms. Gomes recommended that in setting goals and social media plans all the staff assigned in social media should be involved to ensure ownership of the project. Such involvement, she said,  can also generate innovative ideas in creating an engaged social media community.

“ Managers from other departments should also be heard so that everybody is on board in setting goals and strategies to achieve them,” she said.

Mr Dalmulder said to measure your social media engagement, there are analytics tools or verification tools such as Google Analytics and Facebook Insights that are available on line for free that can be relied upon.

Many companies are not aware of the potential of social media. In their experience at RNW, Ms. Gomes said social media generates up to 80% of traffic to its  website. “ It’s an important platform and careful and systematic planning is critical,” she pointed out.

The workshop covered four sessions, namely; how to craft social media goals and key performance indicators, how to create an engaged social media community, social media and engagement analytics, and integrating social media analytics with other multimedia data.

The workshop consultants provided practical cases from RNW and Dutch social media in all the sessions held at the Song Do Convention Centre in Incheon, South Korea.