One thing I don’t hear a lot of social media consultants/experts/gurus or whatever talk about is starting the social media strategy process. If you listen to Forrester you use the POST (people, objectives, strategy, technology) method and if you listen to any other consultant they will all say you start with listening to the conversation before you engage. Ok, that’s great. I say start with your SEO and your analytics. Let me explain.

If you are a large brand or company you are using an analytics solution such as google analytics (you are using one…right?) to track your traffic and understand your visitors. Do you seeing where I’m going with this? I think the first phase a social media strategy should be understanding what your users search for when they are looking for your product or brand. For example if you are Microsoft and you are looking to create a social media strategy around Office, what are you going to do?