Ever met with a client or talked to someone in your organisation and asked "what's our strategy"? If it's social media and they say "we have Facebook, do you think we need Instagram" you groan and think "they need to work some stuff out"? Welcome to strategy!

A Nine Step Social Media Strategy asks the questions that can be answered in a document with examples for staff and other stakeholders can implement.

1. Purpose and Values - Why would someone want to connect with you on social media? What's your purpose? What value?
2. Market Segment and Avatar Communications - who are you talking to? Demographics, Personas, Behavioural. Facebook for example chooses who will see your stuff. Have you got it sorted?
3. Social Spaces and Which Platform - Different platforms have different communities. Or at least people change their voice, their needs, their values when they are on different platforms. Which one should you be on?
4. Identifying Personal Brand Gamification - Are you adjusting your content marketing and rewards to the different members of your community?
5. Engagement Lifecycles and Call to Actions - if you know where your community member is in their lifecycle in your community you can create a call to action better. For example Newcomers need a different CTA than the Elders to engage.
6. Key Influencers amplify the Ripple effect in social media - are you identifying your key influencers and building relationships? Some PR companies just spam anyone on a top list - is there a better strategy?
7. Voice and Etiquette - how do you speak to the community? What is appropriate on LinkedIn vs Vine? Assisting staff to stay on Brand Voice through a strategy. Are you getting back the community behaviours and customer voice that you expect?
8. Social Media Campaigns and Activities - entertaining the community with planned campaigns works much better than letting staff simply put things up online adhoc. The 5 steps of a social media campaign from Monitoring to Creating social objects, building relationships, promoting and call to actions and finally measurement.
9. Rituals and Content Calendars - conversation diaries are regular scheduled events that increase engagement on all platforms.

Other documents such as Resourcing (staff/money) and Staff Guidelines (Thou Shalt/Nots) come from the strategy. But this will get you started.