A couple weeks ago I blogged about how people often confuse using technology as a tool with using technology as part of a broader strategy. While that post focused on the objectives of news organisations in using UGC, I thought it might be useful to write a short follow-up post about strategies.

It’s very simple. Often, I find that people will say their strategy will be to ‘use Twitter’ or ‘use Facebook’ or ‘use Flickr’. They are then surprised (or, for the sceptics, vindicated) when they ‘get no results’.

The following is a simple list of translations from tools to typical strategies:

Tool	Sample strategies
Twitter	Follow people in your ‘market’; tweet useful information; monitor searches on key terms in your field; respond to relevant people with @ messages; use relevant hashtags; retweet anything useful to your followers, or anything that might help users you need to build relationships with
Flickr	Upload photos regularly; comment constructively on other users’ photos; participate constructively in Flickr forums and pools.
Blogs	Post useful content (you might have a particular strategy around the type of content, e.g. linkbait, evergreen content, etc. – this obviously applies to Twitter, Flickr, etc. too); link to other blogs in your field; post constructive comments on other blogs in your field; link your blog presence to presences elsewhere on social media

Of course, as detailed in that previous post, the tools should come after the strategies, and the strategy should come after the objective, but I thought this might be a useful way to clearly communicate what you really want when you ask for a ‘social media strategy’.

I’ve only mentioned 3 tools, because after that you get the idea. If you can add any other strategies for these or other tools, I’ll happily add them in (I’d love to hear them too).

UPDATE: This process in action with an MA TV and Interactive Content group.

UPDATE: This post takes a similar angle on so-called social media strategies and the ‘tick-box’ syndrome.

UPDATE: Below is a very useful diagram on Twitter strategy from Ogilvy PR:

Thanks to Jashpal Mall, whose conversation sparked this post.