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

Part III. STRATEGY

The Five Steps to Social Media Success

Introduction

In The Social Media Bible, Second Edition, I want to take a completely different approach to the strategy of implementing your new social media marketing and communications plan from what was done in the first edition. Most everyone is now familiar with the Communication, Collaboration, Education, and Entertainment, Four Pillars of Social Media from the first edition and how to develop a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) for one's company. You do need to go through that process. You need to do all of the exercises detailed in Part III—Strategy of the first edition. In this second edition, over the next five chapters, I am going to get more hands-on; show you more practical examples, and how to develop a step-by-step plan using the Five Steps to Social Media Success.

After consulting and speaking with many U.S. Fortune 1000 companies on down to the individual entrepreneur, and from governmental agencies to nonprofits, I am always asked the same thing: "Now that we have a Facebook page and sent out some tweets, where do we go from here? How do we integrate and implement a complete social media strategy into our existing marketing, sales, and communications strategy?"

Here are five easy steps (chapters) that explain how and why social media needs to be integrated into your marketing strategy.

• Chapter 38—Analyze Your Existing Media

• Chapter 39—The Social Media Trinity

• Chapter 40—Integrate ...