What makes up an effective social media strategy?  There are three key pieces to effective marketing strategies. ·         Planning ·         Time Management ·         Commitment When it comes to planning effective marketing strategies for social media a recent study says 52% of social marketers are operating “without a game plan,” this is very similar to what another study found in their April 2010 study which was 50%.  What’s even more disconcerting is the people who thought they had a plan in place and yet felt it was not exactly what they needed or even if they were heading in the right direction.  These concerns are exactly why planning is the number one item on the list when creating effective marketing strategies.  In order to put some of these concerns to bed it is important to accomplish the following steps during the planning stage.             Allocate Resources- Decide who is going to be handling the marketing strategies within your organization and what resources they will have at their disposal.             Research what your competitors are doing in regards to their social media-  By checking into each of the major sites you will be able to see what they have been doing and how developed their pages and links are.  You will also be able to see what they have had success with as well by seeing how many “friends”, “followers”, etc they have.             Register Brand Names- it is really important to make sure you have access to your company name across social media sites because your customers are going to be looking for you and you want to make sure they are reaching you and not your “evil twin” Planning can make the difference between a social media campaign that you are trying to do and think might work at some point in the future, but you’re not really sure you buy into completely and using effective marketing strategies to create a successful social media campaign. In the next installment we will talk about time management and why it’s a key piece of effective marketing strategies.