In a relatively short time, social media has quickly evolved into a major new channel for communicating with prospects, customers and potential industry partners. Like any other part of our business, we can’t just jump into it and hope for the best. We need to have a strategy or plan for approaching it. Fortunately, some very smart people have compiled a collection of best practices for planning and implementing a social media strategy, which I have summarized in a new Mind Mapping Insider report.

In this new report, I’ll walk you through each section of the map and explain the issues you need to think about and the questions you need to ask yourself as you formulate your own social media strategy – either for yourself or your organization. It will also lay out a common-sense process you can follow to build effective relationships in the social media space. Finally, you can download this mind map to use as a starting point for developing your own social media strategy.

If you don’t see a link above this paragraph, that’s because this report is only accessible to Mind Mapping Insider members. Why not make a commitment to make a bigger impact in your life and work? The resources in this program will help you to become a better planner, problem solver and project manager. You’ll triumph over information overload, and discover a clarity that will help you to make better decisions, faster. Sign up today to join the growing group of MMI members who have made selected the option to be more influential and creative in their lives. New introductory pricing is more affordable than ever: Only $1 for the first 14 days!

Part of what makes this mind map format work is the progression of colors which seem to follow naturally one to the other; the strong contrast of adjacent branches makes it easy to see which topics belong to which year.

All isn’t perfect about this visual representation, however. First, it’s hard to know where to look at first because this mind map is so busy visually. It takes a moment to figure out what you’re looking at and what it means.

In addition, because the valuations of Facebook for each year are located on separate sub-branches, it’s hard to compare the valuations from one year to the next. If you want to show growth, the usual way you do that visually is via a line or bar chart – which enables you to get a sense of the direction and rate of growth. You can’t discern that from looking at this mind map.

But I do like the idea of a chronologically-oriented mind map. Accordingly, I spent some time brainstorming how you could put this concept to use. Here are two examples:

A yearly planner with major topics for the 12 months of the year:

A weekly planner with seven major topics one for each day of the week:

What do you think? How could you utilize a chronologically-focused mind map in your work and life?

• Links to specific web pages and search tools used to track performance on each service
• Links to third party tools
• Links to the Excel spreadsheets that are used to capture the data from each social media site; in MindManager 8, the open in the viewing pane, which is quite convenient!

I think this map is going to be a real time-saver for me!

You can download this map as a MindManager .mmap file or as a PDF. I hope you enjoy it!

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