By Neal Schaffer,

Author and social media consultant

Many company leaders understand that in order to survive in today's business world, their companies must have a social media presence. But to the detriment of many organizations, strategy is lagging behind. A 2013 survey showed that creating a social media strategy is still a major concern of 83 percent of marketers.

"If your company is going to enter the social media world, you need a strategy because it standardizes messaging, determines how resources are used, defines which tactics you will and won't pursue, serves as a roadmap, and will still carry on its purpose through personnel changes," said consultant Neal Schaffer, author of "Maximize Your Social: A One-Stop Guide to Building a Social Media Strategy for Marketing and Business Success."

He shares 11 essential components of a comprehensive social media strategy, including:

1. Be consistent across all channels. Most businesses already have brand guidelines (including naming, color scheme and imagery), and these should be applied to social media properties as well. The challenge is that most branding guidelines don't include any guidance for the most important part of your brand in social media conversations: your voice.
   Although your brand guidelines might make mention of tone and vocabulary for use in Web copy, social media will challenge those guidelines when you need to have a conversation with an average person. In most instances it's okay to be less formal on social media channels — just make sure that your updates, statuses, comments, etc. 'speak' with a unified voice.
2. Engage. Social media is really about the convergence of communication and information. Content provides the medium to help you engage in conversation — and creating content that is truly resourceful and shareable can have many long-term benefits to your company's social media presence. Content isn't just about blog posts, photos, and videos. Think outside of the box. Presentations, infographics, memes and even discussions (such as in a LinkedIn Group) are all types of content that should be considered for your social media strategy.
3. Share meaningful content. If you're just talking about yourself in social media, no one wants to listen. It's only when you begin to curate content that is of interest to your followers and promote it, together with your own content, that your social media accounts begin to breathe new life. Crowdsourcing content is also a great way of curating — especially if it is from your own fans' tweets about and photos of your products.
4. Join the right networks for your company. There are currently more than 50 social networks with more than 10 million members. You can't — and shouldn't — have a presence on every single one of them. Deciding which social networks to engage in, and creating internal best practices and tactical plans for each of these networks, will form a sizable part of your social media strategy.
5. Post strategically, not constantly. No two social networks are alike, and with limited resources, you'll need to decide how much time you are going to spend on each platform, as well as what you'll be doing there. Tweak your frequency strategy for each social network from time to time so as to maximize the effectiveness of your posting. Frequent posting doesn't necessarily make your social media more effective. For instance, research shows that when a brand posts on Facebook twice a day, those posts receive only 57 percent of the likes and 78 percent of the comments per post that a single post receives.
6. Be worthy of being followed. Engagement should be considered in both its proactive and reactive forms. While most companies do well at proactively engaging with their own content — posting both new content and conversations, as well as the sharing of content and information from others — proactively engaging with new social media users and reactively engaging with those who comment or respond to your updates is equally important to create an effective social media presence.
7. Interact meaningfully with customers. The customer service desk has gone digital. From complaints to questions to praise, consumers (67 percent of them, in fact) are using social media to convey their thoughts, opinions and queries. But many companies are blowing this golden opportunity. For example, a recent study showed that 71 percent of customers who complained via Twitter were not contacted by the company. Your company needs to have a listening — and responding — strategy in place. Listening means more than merely being on the lookout for complaints to defuse. Every engagement with a social media user is a golden opportunity, because it can give you real-time feedback on what your customers are thinking, liking, needing, buying, etc.
8. Regularly introduce new ways to engage customers. Social media campaigns should not be confused with traditional campaigns that are used in marketing to promote new products or discounts. In the social media world, you're not speaking to or at customers; you're speaking with them. Social media campaigns should leverage the social aspect of social media, combined with its viral functionality, to create events that trigger engagement from followers in a new and exciting way.
9. Take a cue from other users. There's no need to navigate the world of social media on your own. Use the examples and successes of other users called influencers to help shape your own strategy and make it more effective. Influencers can consist of individual users, companies, or media outlets that 1) are a part of or serve your target demographic audience, and 2) yield influence online through reporting, blogging, and being active on platforms such as Twitter, Google+, Facebook, and LinkedIn. You can use website rankings, social numbers (such as the number of Facebook fans or Twitter followers), social engagement, frequency of engagement, and more to identify influencers within your target demographic group. At minimum, influencers provide a source for content curation, and by retweeting their content, you increase the chances that they will notice you and reciprocate the favor, thus broadening your reach.
10. Recruit fans to spread the word. Brand ambassadors are current loyal customers and fans who help spread the word about your brand through their own social networks. Harnessing and rewarding ambassadors is a very effective way to help spread the word and value of your brand throughout social media because 92 percent of people trust recommendations from friends and family more than all other forms of marketing.
11. Be prepared to handle trouble. Given the speed at which information travels in social media and the fact that social media is now a primary news source for consumers and the media, it is inevitable that some sort of crisis will occur. Your company needs to always be prepared for the worst. Completely integrating social media into your company's crisis management planning is a very wise decision: 76 percent of social media crises could have been diminished or averted with the proper social media investments. Make sure that your crisis communications plan includes messaging for each of the social media channels you'll be investing in. Beyond that, make sure that your employees are proficient at the social media tools your organization utilizes so that they won't inadvertently make a crisis worse.

Neal Schaffer is the author of Maximize Your Social. Named a Forbes Top 50 Social Media Power Influencer two years in a row, Schaffer is the creator of Advertising Age's Top 100 Global Marketing Blog, Windmill Networking (recently rebranded as Maximize Social Business), and a speaker on social media who also teaches as part of Rutgers University's Mini-MBA in Social Media Marketing Program.