At my current company we have an “official” blog, a Facebook page and three twitter accounts; one for promotions, one official and one for a specific region. The regional twitter account is the most active and was actively posting about a new store opening in their region… unfortunately there was no mention of the opening on the primary twitter account or blog and the blog hasn’t been updated since December of last year. There was some activity on the Facebook page for the opening, but mainly because of the customers were commenting. Additionally there was a Foursquare check-in promotion running but it wasn’t communicated very well to the stores so there were issues with employees not helping our guests.

All this just shows how important it is to have a consistent and defined plan for how you plan to use Social Media to enhance your customer’s experiences.

Bring all the pieces of your Social Media puzzle together and outline the message you want to send. If you have an event coming, plan ahead to get the message out consistently across all of your outlets. With people in different regions, be sure they are aware of what is going on in other places so that that can either support the interested users or at least point them in the right direction. And of course if you have promotions being sent via Social Media, be very sure that your employees know what the promotion is and how the guest will be taking advantage of the offerings.

In the end, a well planned, well defined and well executed Social Media plan can have dramatic impact on your customer’s experience encouraging them to share their positive experiences with their friends and family.