Change is inevitable in business. That includes changing roles, employers and brands you may experience as a social media professional. Whether you’re new to the game or you’ve been in it for years, the basics of getting started are essentially the same. And, it starts with a few key questions.

Who are your stakeholders? In addition to your supervisors, internal/external clients and colleagues, there are others across the business who have a stake in how social media brings the brand to life. Think about who you’ll work with to secure approvals, to vet concepts and ideas with, to align marketing programs with and more. Identify these people, and build a plan for communicating with them as frequently as is needed to build relationships, explore opportunities for collaboration and mutual benefits and demonstrate the value of what you’re doing.

What is the current social landscape? Audit the social platforms your brand leverages. Examine how actively these communities are managed, how often and with what resources. Audit the maturity of the social media function itself for the business you support. Look for areas of strength and weakness, and where you can make a difference.

How is the brand approaching its marketing goals? Understand the brand’s personality. Learn about the marketing personas it aims to connect with — and what matters most to them. Identify where you are connecting with them — via social and other channels —and, where there are opportunities for growth in ways that matter to the brand.

Who are you targeting? Evaluate the brand’s priority publics and target audiences. What do they care about most? Where are they connected with you via social, and where could you be connected with them? Understand where you can reach them with organic and paid content — and where you need to acquire them.

What content strategy is in place? Examine social content for the goals it aims to achieve, the pillars that are being leveraged to bring this to life and how the current strategy is performing. What’s working? What isn’t? And, if there is no content strategy in play, look to the overarching marketing communications strategies and how social content may support these with the people who matter most to the brand.

What tech tools are available to you? Evaluate the technologies that are in place to manage, evaluate, listen and report on social. Know how much of what you’ll be doing is automated versus how much will be manual. Understand how often you’ll be able to see and report social performance analytics. Build your slate of work based on a reasonable amount of time dedicated to strategy, execution, evaluation and performance reporting. And, set expectations with others as to how often they can expect reporting from you.

How will you measure success? Going into a new social media role, you probably know what the goals are. Or, you may be developing them as part of your responsibilities. Regardless, think about the ways you can demonstrate value, progress and success. Choose performance measure you can benchmark, track and report over time. And, make sure you’re realistic in terms of what you’ll use to show results.

Of course, there are many, many more steps involved in launching support for a new brand — or for a brand that’s new to you. Whether you use these and/or other questions to kick off your work, be sure you approach the role with the goal of adding value, and you should be in good shape.