When someone talks about a social media strategy or a social media campaign; what are they talking about? Are they the same thing? Hopefully you said no. The two are definitely not the same thing. The terms social media campaign and social media strategy have been used interchangeably quite a bit so I wanted to clarify what the difference between the two of them in a clear bulleted list.
Social media strategy
- Comes before a social media campaign
- Is set to build the social media foundation for all other social media efforts
- what tools are going to be used and how are you going to use them?
- Is a long term umbrella approach for company social media
- around 1 year +
- Includes specific objectives, strategies, tactics, and metrics
- i.e. social media for pr/marketing/sales/product development
- Should integrate into existing marketing efforts
- i.e. the company social media plan
- Clear analysis of your audience
- Seeking to solve client/customer pain points
- Maps and plans out allocation of resources
- More about providing and creating content as opposed to looking for immediate results from a community
- Focused more on longer term ROI/impact
- not just a financial metric but building and strengthening a brand
Social media campaign
- Comes after the social media strategy
- Shorter term
- run campaigns before product launched
- promote products/events/services
- usually around 1-3 months (can be longer)
- Builds upon audience research data collected from the strategy
- Builds upon the tools being used for the strategy
- promote the campaign through channels identified in the strategy
- Looking to drive a specific targeted response
- increase page views
- increase sales for a new product
- Looks at shorter term ROI and impact
- looking at the financial return and the short term impact
- not looking at the brand as a whole
Hopefully this clearly spells out the difference between the two. The social media strategy is where everything starts, it’s your social media foundation, you can’t have a campaign before you have a strategy. The information you get from researching and creating your strategy is what is largely going to be used for your campaigns.
Have anything else you want to add to help differentiate the two? Leave a comment and if it makes sense, I’ll add it to the master document.
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