Planning to be social

Many companies and organizations dive head first into social media. They create accounts and pages to services such as Twitter and Facebook without stopping to think why. The outcome is usually empty, hollow and dull and it interests and impresses no-one.

On the other hand organizations spend huge amount of time and effort to plan everything in advance. Social media and it's services are like living organisms. They evolve. Users of these services also evolve and their ways using them change all the time. New users' groups may take over the services that earlier used to attract another types of customers. And sometimes some services get more or less abandoned or some other service suddenly wins over masses of new users.

Overplanning is as bad as not planning at all. It may result to inflexible ways to utilize social media. Planning may also take such a long time the actual implementation never happens. Succeeding in social media requires nerve to experiment with something rather new and somewhat unpredictable.

Actually planning never stops. Planning methods, such as POST will help to launch the process. When the target groups, objectives and strategies are assessed, it's time to choose the platform and launch the execution. After some time the original plans will need a revisit and adjustments. Ongoing and flexible planning helps to keep up with the constantly changing world of social media.