As I am getting my daughter ready to go to her first day of preschool (tomorrow!!), I’ve started talking to new potential clients. I have more time again, and it only makes sense to fill that time up with work that I’m excited about. So I’ve started thinking about how I would go into these potential clients and restructure their social media.

This is not to say anyone who came before me did a bad job. It’s just that I do things a little differently and so often, these accounts need something a little different.

So how do I go about doing that?

Inventory

I’m not looking to reinvent the wheel, so my first step in any restructure is to look at what has been done in the past. What does that inventory entail?

• Website: What exists on the website? Who is it for? Are there any patterns? Any obvious gaps? What pages are getting the most hits? Does all of this align with what the client is telling me on their intake paperwork?
• Social media: What has the client been posting up until now? Who is the audience? What has been successful? And what has flopped? What kind of media does this audience like? What times are best to post? Any obvious gaps? Does all of this align with what the client is telling me on their intake paperwork?

I comb through the existing content as extensively as is possible to see where they are at. The goal is to find out what should be repeated and what needs to be left behind. I also take a look at demographics of the audience to see if they are in the ballpark of who the client thinks their audience is.

There is more to this inventory, but you get the basic idea. And one of the most important parts of this is to see whether what has happened aligns with what the client is telling me. That can tell me a lot about how much of a restructure this will be and what the skill level of the client actually is. I then know my starting point.

Research

If there is a step I love the most, it’s the research step. There is always more research to do, and its endlessness makes me happy for some reason. Knowing when to stop before it becomes noise is the biggest key to this part of the restructure.

I use a threefold system for this step to piece out what is important and what I can disregard.

• Persona: I create any primary personas I need, as well as secondary. I give them as much detail as possible so that they feel like a real person. By the time I am done, they feel like a best friend. I then attach them to a social network so that they can inform the voice. My goal is to have one persona per social network, so we keep focused. But there are special cases where this isn’t possible.
• Buyer’s journey: Once I have my persona, I take them through the journey of buying from my client. Keep in mind that buying doesn’t have to be just a pure transaction of money. There are many ways to buy from an organization without actually giving any money, so we identify all of those. And then send our persona out to see what they encounter.
• Semantic search: Lastly, I take applicable keywords and do some research around them. This gives me an idea of what people are searching for right now and what kind of content my client should be creating. Whereas there is some art to the first two sections of my research step, the third is pure research.

This step gives me a good idea of the best steps forward. It tells me a lot about who we’re trying to attract and what we should be posting for them. I collect all of this into a manageable plan and that’s when the fun really gets started.

Identify what’s missing

Is there anything more fun than identifying the content holes? Okay, maybe for most people there is a whole lot that’s more fun. But for me, this can give me months of work to do, and I love a good plan.

This is pretty straightforward. I take a look at what content we already have and compare it against what I found we needed. During this process, I also categorize the existing content based on what the research showed. This categorization will continue as we move forward to make sure everything is easy to find. The categories might change as we do more content experimentation, but the process of categorizing never will change.

I then venture out to social media and check out what the communities are posting. Just like with the client’s existing content, I’m looking for holes based on what my research has shown.

Finally I prioritize the content based on goals and create a schedule of what needs to be created when. This also includes any reposting (or re-creating) of any existing content. When I’m done, I usually have a plan for roughly six months. That doesn’t mean it’s a strict plan. There can be adjustments as we experiment. But it’s a rough guide of what to do that we can always fall back onto.

Presentation of the restructure

The last step is making everything understandable to the client. I outline our buyers and how they influence our social media presence (including voice). I give the schedule of content creation. And then I give the first week of content. In other words, I tell them about what I found and then I show them what it looks like in practice.

At this point, the client gives their feedback, and I can incorporate them. It’s not always possible to fully incorporate every piece of feedback, so that may be where the education aspect of our partnership will get started. But we work together until the plan is just right for everyone. To be honest, this is usually a much shorter process than it sounds. I’ve gathered enough information that I’m pretty much spot-on. But slight adjustments are usually necessary to make sure I have all of the client’s needs accounted for in the plan.

This process has to happen before I can post, so that I’m not stabbing in the dark. The restructure is always worth it and a great way to make sure we’re all on the same page when it comes to social media. And so much more can happen when we’re on the same page.

How do you approach doing a social media restructure?