Maggie McGary is the Social Media Manager for the American Speech Language Hearing Association, and she recently posted on her Mizz Information blog about the results of the ASHA fan page that she set up in Facebook.
According to Maggie’s post, they started the Fan page about eight months ago with no goals and no plan, and today it has 20,000 fans. Now, ASHA is a big association and it has a large student base, so I doubt all associations will get this kind of growth, but it points out a key lesson when it comes to social media: get out there before you are clear on what you are going to do in social media. I don’t mean jump into all the tools because they are the newest thing. You still need to develop a strategy. It’s not “if you build it they will come.”
But you are not going to have your strategy all developed first and THEN you launch your initiative. You’re going to be developing it (in part) on the fly because part of the essence of social media is that the users actually get a say in how it develops. But the longer you wait to start and get out there, the longer it will take for you to get the results.
