Building a Social Media Marketing Strategy From Scratch

Unlike a single-platform plan, a real social media strategy in 2006 has to account for a landscape that keeps shifting. MySpace is the dominant general-audience network by a wide margin. Facebook, still restricted to students at an expanding list of universities and high schools, has been steadily opening its doors wider each quarter. YouTube, founded in early 2005, has become the default place to host and share video without a broadcast budget. Building a strategy from scratch means deciding how to split limited time across different platforms, including ones still in motion.

Step 1: Audit where your actual audience already spends time

Before picking platforms, figure out who you’re trying to reach. MySpace skews younger and more consumer-facing. Facebook’s campus-rooted audience skews toward students and young professionals, though its footprint is expanding school by school. YouTube’s audience is defined less by demographics and more by anyone willing to search for or stumble on a video. Don’t assume you need all three; pick based on overlap with your actual customers, not on hype.

Step 2: Start with one platform, not three

Trying to run a MySpace profile, a Facebook presence and a YouTube channel simultaneously with limited staff produces three mediocre efforts instead of one good one. Pick the single platform with the strongest overlap with your audience and commit real time to it first. Expand only once that one is generating something you can point to, growing engagement, inbound messages, actual traffic back to your site.

Step 3: Keep an eye on Facebook even if you can’t use it yet

Facebook’s steady expansion beyond its original Harvard-only launch is worth watching closely. The platform’s verified-identity culture, carried over from its campus roots, means interactions there tend to be more personal and more trusted than the pseudonymous norm on other networks. If your business depends on trust, professional services, higher-consideration purchases, this is a platform worth being ready to move on the moment your audience can join it.

Step 4: Use video deliberately, not because you feel you should

YouTube lets you put video in front of an audience without a broadcast budget for the first time, but a poorly made video actively hurts a brand more than no video at all. If you have something worth showing, a product demo, a behind-the-scenes look, use it. If you don’t have anything worth filming yet, skip this step rather than posting filler just to have a presence.

Step 5: Write down what success looks like before you start

Decide up front whether you’re measuring audience growth, direct engagement (comments, messages), or traffic back to your own site. Chasing all three at once with no priority usually means optimizing for the easiest one to move, follower count, which is rarely the one that matters most to the business.

Step 6: Revisit the plan every quarter, not every week

These platforms are still changing shape month to month, and a network that’s closed to you today may not be closed next quarter. A strategy built now needs to be revisited as the landscape shifts, but that doesn’t mean chasing every new feature the moment it launches. Give a chosen approach a real quarter to show results before deciding whether to adjust it or move on.