SOCIAL MEDIA

Individual Assignment

Important information
Due date: Nov 10, 2016 EOD
Weighting: 30% of your total course mark

Instructions
1. To answer this assignment, use the information you learnt throughout this course, as well as your
own research and experience.
2. No late submissions will be accepted.
3. Answer all questions in your own words.
4. The word limit for this assignment is 2 500 words. Assignments that exceed the word limit by
more than 100 words will receive a mark penalty.
5. We encourage you to write your answers in short sentences, bullet points and simple lists keep
your answers brief and to the point.
6. This assignment must be completed using the available Word document template.
7. Use your own brand for this assignment, or a well-known brand of your choice.

Total marks: 100

Planning is one of the most critical elements in ensuring that your investment in social media is
worthwhile for your brand. Your task for this assignment is to draw on everything you have learnt in the
course and put together a comprehensive social media strategy for your brand.

Ideally, this is something you could take away with you and present to your manager or team, or use as
a motivation for the inclusion of a social media budget in your marketing strategy.

You need to include the following sections under the given subheadings in your strategy:

1. INTRODUCTION (10)
An introduction to your brand and a brief outline of your existing social media presence.

What does your organization do? What is your offering?

What is the nature of your current social media offering? Provide URLs where possible.
Note: think about how the above would dictate how you plan your social media engagement.

2. BRAND PERSONA (10)

Please create a persona for your brand. Here you need to include the following:
An image that captures the persona
An overview of the personality of the brand persona what makes your persona different?
Brand personality traits how would you describe your brand personality, and how wouldnt you
describe it?
Voice of the brand persona how would they speak?

3. SOCIAL MEDIA OBJECTIVES (15)

What do you want to achieve with your social media presence and how does this tie in with your
business objectives? It is essential that these are focused and communicated succinctly not in an
essay format. There may be many objectives here but these need to be refined for your social media
communications plan. We need to see how your chosen objectives dictate the rest of your social media
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plan. Included here must be an explanation of why social media is the right tool for achieving what you
need to.

List your objectives, by when you hope to achieve them and how you plan to measure your success.
Target to list 5 objectives and remember that these need to be SMART.

4. TARGET MARKET AND MEDIA HABITS (10)

How would you describe your target market and any subsets that exist within it? Here you can
look at specific segments you might have.
What do they want and need from your brand? Think about how this will support your choice of
platforms, which you will need to outline in section 5.
How and when do they engage what do you know about their habits?
(Note that for this section, you will have to have conducted some degree of social listening.)

5. COMPETITOR ANALYSIS (15)

Select one of your key competitors and put together a brief analysis of their social media presence
online.

Choose a brand that you can learn something from, whether that is best practices or things to avoid
doing.

Please include the following elements:

Introduction to the brand - Product or service offering, brand personality and communication
style. Remember to indicate what makes this brand different to your own.
A list of the current spaces in which the brand has an online presence. You can include non-
social media spaces, such as websites. Please include URLs and a brief description of each,
including any relevant numbers (e.g. followers, fans). Wed like to see what purpose lies behind
the implementation of each of these.
A critical look at each space where they have a presence. How do they interact and engage?
What is being done right and what is wrong? How are you coming to the conclusions you are
making? How will what you learn inform your own plan?

6. PLATFORMS (15)
An outline of the platform(s) you plan to use to execute your strategy and a justification of these choices.
Be sure that you answer the following questions:

What platform(s) have you chosen?

Why did you choose this specifically? What does this platform offer in terms of your specific
needs?
How are you going to use them to implement your strategy? What features, tools will you use and
how? Remember that you should try to leverage the functionality of the platform(s) you select
but keep your budget and resources in mind.
Who are you trying to reach with each platform?
How will you use your platforms to leverage each other?

7. CONTENT AND ENGAGEMENT PLAN (15)

Please outline what content you plan to include in your implementation as well as how you plan to
engage with your customers. Please note that you do not need to create the actual content and
engagement plans.

Include your thoughts on the following areas:

The content pillars or themes that underlie the content you create
Content types that you plan to share with your community (for example, frivolous pieces for
engagement, twice a week)
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Some examples of topics you plan to cover

Engagement plans for your brand (how often will you engage with your consumers and post
content?) What engagement strategies will you use? How do you plan to manage this?
Note the differences in content for different platforms as well (if applicable)

8. CHALLENGES AND CONSIDERATIONS (10)

What challenges do you think you will encounter in rolling out your strategy, what other things do you
need to consider and how do you plan to address these? Consider broad, big-picture factors as well as
specific issues you may encounter.

Good luck!