This is often due to strategic planning for social media efforts being hurried, not well executed or neglected all together.

A winning social media program should achieve two results, in no particular order: Drive value for your fans (your members or potential members) and create growth and opportunity for your credit union.

At the end of the day, taking pause to develop a thoughtful plan will go a long way in pre-empting resource fatigue on social media execution and the inevitable, "So what's the point of this anyway?" question.

For those of you in the middle of strategic planning season, consider these four steps as a guide to developing a social media strategy that will grow your credit union.

Step 1: Plan

If you're going to plan, gather an executive sponsor and one person from each of these areas: Finance, technology, marketing, member services and legal/compliance.

Get everyone in a room for planning. Why? So everyone can have his or her say and you can come out with a go-forward decision on a game plan. Here's what you need to cover:

Flush out a few personas of your core or high value member segments. Who are they, what motivates them, where do they hang out online and offline, and what keeps them up at night?

First, this will help you focus on selecting the social platforms that matter so you're not spread too thin.

Second, this will focus your development of content that is valuable to them and can drive results for your credit union.

The people assembled will add detail to the personas, help drive content ideation and present objections that can be confronted immediately rather than at launch.

Planning seeks to understand why you're doing social media in the first place, and a persona development exercise will help you do that.

You should be able to answer the following questions: Who are we reaching? How? Where? Why? With what content?

Content will be the key to developing metrics that matter and turning your social media efforts from cute cat videos, inspirational quotes and random teller photos into a real marketing channel.

Step 2: Invest

The difference between effective social media and ineffective social media is investment, both financial and time. If you've taken the time to plan, you'll have a crystal clear idea of what you need to invest in and it will likely fall into these categories:

Content: To drive social media engagement and results that matter, you need content. Your content needs to emotionally appeal to the personas you developed. This will require resources that are either internal or external, but should be good quality and consistent.

Content topics should span a variety of media types – blog posts, videos and downloads, for example.

Some of these topics will be related to finance, like retirement planning, while others may be more than just financial. Try a "Preparing for Life After College" series of videos, blogs and a downloadable guide for 20-something's coming out of college and dealing with everything from paying back student loans, creating a budget and saving for retirement to work/life balance, staying healthy and adjusting to the workplace.

These content downloads and interactions become sources of leads for email and marketing automation sequences.

Technology: Depending on your goals and team, you may need some tools and technology to facilitate the development, approval and distribution of content. Document your requirements and do some research as tools can run from free to charging a monthly fee.

Media: Finally, be prepared to spend some money on paid social. Without paid media, you'll reach only a small portion of your following. Plus, you'll want some budget to support other promotional campaigns throughout the year designed to drive engagement, and ultimately leads and opportunity through your credit union.

Step 3: Follow up and execute consistently

Once your team has discussed your investment capabilities, make sure you have the resources and systems in place to follow up, focusing on two critical areas:

Social support: While you will build a marketing program that will be the envy of everyone, social media is also a channel consumers use to find answers and get help. Make sure you have a plan and resources in place to manage social response to member and community questions and concerns. This may be a role taken on by marketing or rolled into your contact center, and the key is to discuss and prepare for what makes sense at your credit union.

Lead nurturing: Remember that content we discussed? Our goal is to drive people back to your credit union's website as often as possible to interact with some original content, and download a guide or resource in exchange for some basic information like name and email. This information allows us to kick off an email or marketing automation sequence, follow up and move them along a path to the next step of conversion, such as submitting an application.

All the while, we're tracking this and attributing these high-value events to our activity on social media so the next time we get asked about metrics from social, we can report metrics that matter.

Step 4: Measure

Finally, as part of our 2017 strategic planning meeting, let's discuss those metrics that matter. A solid credit union social media marketing strategy needs an equally solid measurement plan.

Look to two things to help develop your measurement plan and identify what you want to measure: Insights and business goals.

Insights: What type of data about your social following would be helpful in refining our understanding of our personas and affirming we're being effective at reaching the right people? Here are some thoughts on this:

• Look at the location data for your following to make sure they are part of your addressable market.

• Measure a steady incline in the engagement rate (percentage of people who saw your content and engaged via a like, share or comment).

• If you're using Facebook, measure "talking about this" (how many people are generating stories because of interactions with your content – this increases your reach).

Business goals: These should be heavily focused on traffic and conversion. Look to measure an increase in social referral traffic to high value pages and landing pages. Also look to measure conversions and site events, attributing back to social media.

While the planning may feel like overkill, ask yourself if you want to create value or just add to social noise. The answer is the difference between a social media strategy that grows your credit union and one that eats up resources.

Ryan Ruud is CEO & Founder of Credit Union Consulting Group. He can be reached at 612-799-0803 or [email protected].