Seven steps to go about running a smooth social media strategy

1. A thorough analysis of what is being said online about your organisation and your competitors is a good place to start. Once you have an idea of what perceptions already exist about you, you can then seek to change or enhance these.
2. It is crucial that at the outset you have a clear sense of what your objectives are for your campaign and how you want this to benefit your business. Clearly identifying audiences will also go a long way, as well as identifying the internal subject matter experts that will be responsible for providing content and also outline the sign-off procedure for posting content.
3. You will then need to decide which tactical channels you will use to implement your campaign. Blogs, microblogging (Twitter), Social networks (LinkedIn, Facebook etc) and YouTube Channels are all free to join and offer potentially huge market penetration.
4. You should try and ensure you update your channels on a regular basis with focused, quality and relevant content, thus helping to establish your brand as a responsive and interactive authority in its field. Tracking conversations is also crucial to make sure you can respond quickly to any comments, positive or negative. This will well on your organisation’s customer service in a public forum.
5. As well as being informative, your output also needs to be regarded as authentic and transparent. Being something you’re not will immediately come across as fake and will damage credibility. For instance, you would not expect HMRC to start using colloquialisms in its Twitter posts. Your output should try to reflect the culture of your organisation where it can.
6. Although a more laid back and conversational approach is desirable to make a social media campaign work, compliance procedures must be followed in much the same way they are for other marketing or PR materials, so as to avoid any legal or reputational pitfalls.  
7. As with any output, business owners will be looking for tangible ways to measure the success of social media campaigns. There are a number of basic and easy metrics to measure success or failure, such as website visits, website page views, average visitor time on your site, inbound links to your website, blog visits, Facebook followers, Twitter followers, clicks on Tweets, and so on. Social media monitoring tools are also available (such as Visible Technologies) that allow you to look at more complex trends across industry subjects and to track competitor activity and trends across the entire social media in question.