The Social Media Bible: Tactics, Tools, and Strategies for Business Success

Part III. Strategy

The next five chapters focus on developing a social media strategy for your business. In Chapter 39, we take a closer look at the four pillars of social media strategy: Communicate, Collaborate, Educate, and Entertain. Each pillar supports a platform for engaging your customers, prospects, and employees. Your platform will depend on the tools and applications you valued the most on your tool scorecards from Part II.

Chapter 40 is your social media SWOT analysis. This is another activity-based chapter and an ideal group exercise if you are involving others from your organization. The SWOT analysis will help you take a critical look at your organization, assessing strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats from a macro perspective and in the context of the social media tools that are the most practical and valuable.

Chapter 41 introduces you to the ACCESS model, an acronym for Audience, Concept, Competition, Execution, Social media, and Sales viability. In a world where everyone using social media is a publisher, the ACCESS model is a methodology for developing and connecting your content to the ideal audience.

Chapter 42, yet another activity-based chapter, helps you evaluate and organize your existing company resources, an important step before you create and implement a social media strategy. Finally in Chapter 43, you're ready to develop a modest 12-month social media macro strategy.