Step #1 Selecting Social Media Sites

Before you can begin implementing your social media strategy youneed to prepare which sites you will need to help execute your plans. There are several of these social media wheel diagrams out on the internet if you need any ideas. ideally, you will want to select one of each of the following, a blog, a social site, a multimedia site, and potentially a discussion forum. This is where knowing your business (Step #10 social media planning) and understanding where your target audience resides.

At a minimum I think that everyone should at least be utilizing, Twitter, a blog, Facebook, YouTube, Linkedin and maybe Flickr. These sites will probably capture a majority of your target demographic and you have a good sampling of each of the social media categories of forums, multimedia, social networks and micro blogging. I wouldn’t recommend you engage and anymore as you are susceptible to loosing visibility if you struggle updating content regularly. I believe that I started with Linkedin and twitter primarily because I was already engaged in that site but realized I really needed a discussion forum and created a community site on http://www.collectivex.com. Next I created a blog to use for promotion of events and company updates and last but not least Facebook was the last we implemented once we had the other communities in place. Again, these my not be the same sites you select but will give you a good foundation for posting your content.