When I designed my first social media strategy, I was still green behind the ears. Shortly after completing my degree in social sciences, I was given the task of creating a social media strategy for a public institution in my first agency job. After a short briefing from the head of marketing, I set about the extensive research work and pored over all the internal and external material that was made available to me. Little by little, a picture of how this organization should position itself in social media began to form in my head. Within two weeks, I had created a 30-page, very text-heavy Word document. I had to present this to the management and the marketing team in two meetings. The management reacted "favorably", in complete contrast to the marketing team, which was ultimately supposed to implement the strategy operationally...

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"Why weren't we told?", "Why wasn't I asked?", "How does this Xing even work?", "Who is supposed to read all this?" "We don't even have time for that!" were just some of the statements I had to listen to in fairness.

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What mistakes had I made?

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1. No involvement of stakeholders
2. No focus on feasibility
3. The team on the customer side is not sufficiently empowered
4. Too long and complicated document
5. No integration into other marketing measures

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After eight years of professional experience in the field of social media marketing and the creation of around a dozen national and international social media strategies, I can retrospectively conclude that the strategic approach was not completely wrong, but that two very important aspects were ignored: The actual company reality, as well as the involvement of employees and management.

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An interesting contrast; in my most comprehensive social media strategy support to date, the process took four months and we integrated over 100 people from various divisions and subsidiaries. Several documents and training modules were created, but the core of the international strategy was "only" a visually appealing manual of ten pages. This organization now sees social media as part of its DNA. Hardly any marketing campaign is thought of without social media and a measurable return on investment (ROI) has been achieved.

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Other mistakes in the social media strategies of other agencies

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In addition to my mistakes described above, I often notice the following shortcomings in the social media strategies of other agencies, which I would like to share with you:

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6. No orientation towards the overarching corporate goals
7. No overarching measurability of success
8. Insufficient description of the target groups and the ways to reach them
9. Channel strategies instead of social media strategies
10. Disregarding the reality of social media (organic reach is becoming increasingly irrelevant)

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With this in mind #failforward #neverstop #socialdna