From Madden to Dungeons and Dragons, the skill tree is an essential element of game mechanics. Skill trees dictate the abilities and focus of the player and are built by assigning limited resources, or skill points, to form strengths and weaknesses. Read how to apply this gaming standard to build your social media strategy from the primary social media strategy archetypes.
You can build a media darling quarterback, an unstoppable offensive guard or a speedy, sticky fingered receiver. The key lesson is that no player can be the best at everything and the strategy adopted is limited to points available. Your options are limitless, but your points are limited and your skill set depends entirely on your intent and strategy.
Skill trees in business
In business, skill trees become the application of labor and budget (points) to balance strengths and weaknesses to match your company’s intent and goals is a daily task.
Like a game, you can ‘level up,’ successful strategies by applying more budget or rebalance to try new tactics.
Using the same methodology as building game characters, you can build a digital strategy by apply points to the essential social strategy types below.
Social media strategy types
Football has skills for speed, throwing and tackling. Social media strategies build from skills in the following communication strategy classes:
- Organizational
- Sharing corporate information (press releases) with your community.
- Promotional
- Sharing exclusive offers, coupons, sales and opportunities with your community.
- Informational
- Sharing related information, coaching and advice with your community.
- Conversational
- Interacting with individuals in your community.
- Observational
- Tracking trends, brand perception and service quality in your community.
Example skill sets
Below are some noteworthy social media skill sets and the companies that use them famously.
Organizational: Drop all your points in organizational and you could be the 2 million follower strong @Mashable account, who posts exclusively official releases linking back to their own website or may draw a marginal following if your releases are purely corporate in nature and don’t offer value to the community.
Promotional: Drop all your points in promotion and you could experience @Dell’s promotion-only Twitter campaign that led to nearly to $6.5 million in sales. You could also be opening the door to an overload that could be detrimental to your brand.
Informational/Conversational: Never underestimate the power of being helpful. Best Buy’s experimental @Twelpforce famously lured the lines between service and marketing by openly inviting customers to ask questions using the digital platform. Armed with 2,500 employees, @Twelpforce aimed to secure Best Buy as the starting point in digital lifestyle conversations.
The best social media strategy
The best social media strategy depends largely on your goals and branding. If the goal is to drive traffic to a particular landing page, then promotional and informational tactics are often successful. If the goal is to connect with customers, improve loyalty and monitor the brand, than conversational and observational methods work exceedingly well. Rarely will a ‘pure’ strategy be the most effective. Success is found in the right balance for the key performance indicators you’re tracking towards the goals you’ve set.
What is the best social media strategy for my company?
Share your goals in the comments below. I’ll do my best to help you on your path to discovering the right social media strategy for maximum ROI. Alternatively, you can Contact Us for more in-depth support on your total digital strategy.
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Tags: corporate social media, facebook, facebook for business, Marc Frechette, marketing, social media, Tweet, twitter
