Create A Social Media Strategy
By the end of this article on 'How to Create a Social Media Strategy', you can plan a much better social media marketing strategy for your business.
And as always, for any one-on-one consulting and assistance, you may contact me at tariq@bloggersbloom.com
Without a strategy, you are just posting on social media platforms for the sake of posting. Without understanding what your goals are, who your target audience is, and what they want, it is hard to achieve results on social media.
The key ingredient for social media marketing, well, is to have a “Strategy”.
And yes, being Consistent too.
Without a strategy, you are just posting on social media platforms for the sake of posting. Without understanding what your goals are, who your target audience is, and what they want, it is hard to achieve results on social media.
Either you want to grow your brand through social media or you want to level up as a social media marketer, developing a social media marketing strategy is essential.
What is a Social Media Strategy?
A social media strategy is a digest of everything you plan to achieve on social media channels. It guides you and your actions and lets you know whether you’re succeeding or failing.
The more specific your plan is, the more effective it will work and give you the best results. Keep it concise. Don’t make it so lofty and broad that it’s unattainable or impossible to measure.
In this post, you will walk through an six-step plan to create a winning social media marketing strategy of your own.
Below is a social media strategy to help you identify your social media goals, engage audiences, and optimize your results:
- Set meaningful social marketing goals
- Research your target audience
- Establish your most important metrics
- Dig into what your competitors are doing?
- Make timeliness a top priority
- Do a social media audit
[Related article: How To Create A Content Calendar]
Set Goals That are Useful for Your Business
First things first: you need to figure out what you want out of social media at large.
Thinking about a social media strategy means having an endgame in mind.
Whether that means more dollars and cents from your existing social presence or amping up your reach with new followers is totally up to you.
What matters is that you set realistic goals for social media marketing.
Increase brand awareness. To create authentic and lasting brand awareness, it is important to avoid solely publishing promotional messages. Instead, focus on content that emphasizes your personality or values first.
Grow your brand’s audience. Bringing new followers into the fold means finding ways to introduce your brand to folks who haven’t heard of you before.
Growing your audience also can be said to discover conversations around your business and industry that matter the most for the business.
Digging into your social media channels is nearly impossible without monitoring or listening to specific keywords, phrases, or hashtags. Through more efficient social media targeting, you can reach your core audience much faster.
Increase community engagement. Find ways to grab the attention of your current followers. This means experimenting with messaging and content. Even something as simple as only asking a question can increase your engagement rate.
Your customers can be your best cheerleaders, but only if you’re giving them some activity to do.
Any combination of these explicit goals can help you better understand which networks to tackle.
When in doubt, keep your social media strategy simple rather than muddling it with too many objectives that might distract you.
Research Your Target Audience
Making assumptions is a dangerous game for marketers.
What you really need to know is about your audience to influence your social media marketing strategy which is already out in the open.
Take today’s social media demographics. These numbers speak directly to which networks your brand should approach and what types of content you should publish.
Here are some key takeaways:
Facebook as well as YouTube are prime places for ads due in part to their high-earning user bases.
The majority of Instagram’s are millennials signaling the strength of bold, eye-popping content that oozes with personality.
LinkedIn’s user base is highly professional, making it a hub for in-depth, industry-specific content that might be more complicated than what you see on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter.
And although the demographics data above gives you insight into each channel.
Establish Your Most Important Metrics
No matter what you are selling, your social media strategy should be data-guided.
That means focusing on the social media metrics that matter to your business.
Metrics marketers should keep an eye on
What metrics are we talking about, though? Check out the breakdown below:
Reach: Post reach is the number of users who saw your post. How far is your content rolling out across social? Is it actually reaching users’ feeds? In the face of ever-changing organic algorithms, tracking reach is arguably more important than ever.
Clicks: This is the number of clicks on your content, company name as well as the logo. Link clicks are critical to understanding how users move through your marketing funnel. Tracking clicks per campaign are essential to understand what drives curiosity or encourages people to buy your product or services.
Engagement: The total number of social engagements divided by the total number of impressions multiplied by 100. Engagement, it’s about not only seeing who interacted but also if it was a good ratio out of your total reach. This sheds light on how well your audience perceives you and their willingness to interact.
Hashtag performance: What were your most used hashtags on your side? Which hashtags were most connected with your brand? Or what hashtags created the most engagement? Having these answers can help you in shaping your focus towards moving content forward.
Organic and paid likes: For channels like Facebook, organic engagement is much harder to gain traction, that is why many brands have turned on Facebook Ads. However, earning organic likes on Instagram isn’t quite as difficult as Facebook. Knowing these differences can help you budget both your ad spent and the time you invest in different formats.
Sentiment: This is how users react to your content, posts, stories, blogs, brand or hashtag. Did customers find your recent campaign offensive? What type of sentiment are people connecting with your campaign hashtag? It’s always better to dig deeper and find out how people are talking about your brand.
Dig Into What Your Competitors are Doing?
Before you start creating content, you should have a good idea of what your competitors are up to.
While some brands might want to look into third-party competitor analysis tools to dig deeper into their competitors’ numbers, you can also gain useful insights from a fairly simple review of competitors’ social presence.
Looking at your competitor’s social channels will directly inform you about your own social media promotion strategy. The goal here isn’t to copycat or steal your competitors’ ideas. Instead, it’s to determine what’s working for them and what conclusions you can draw to adapt your own campaigns accordingly for your business.
Same industry, different strategies
See what they’re posting on Facebook. Contrast your Twitter engagement with theirs. Find out how they’re tagging their content on Instagram. Optimize your own strategy. Rinse and repeat.
Of course, you need to know who your competitors are before you start stressing over content creation. That’s why analysis is so important.
How to spot your social competitors
The simplest way to find competitors is through a simple Google search. Look up your most valuable keywords, to see who shows up.
Make Timeliness a Top Priority
Timeliness is a two-way street.
You can’t always expect customers to operate on “your time.”
Likewise, it’s crucial to be able to reach and respond to followers in a timely manner.
How to do it both, though? Let’s break it down.
Post at the best times to engage
Quick question: when is your brand available to engage and interact with customers?
You might see some recommending times to post late in the evening, for example. But if your brand isn’t there to communicate, what’s the point of posting at the “preferred” time?
Instead, try to ensure your social media or community managers at what time they are available and ready to answer any of your products, questions, or concerns when you tweet or post. It’s smart to learn the best times to post on social media.
And hey, that leads us to our next point.
Respond to your customer questions and shout-outs ASAP
Not only do customers expect speedier responses from brands but also meaningful conversations on a regular basis.
Your brand shouldn’t forget these core elements of networking. It takes efforts to ensure conversations or engagement opportunities aren’t left unattended.
Through social media, you can only gain respect as a brand by just being present and talking to your audience. That’s why taking social customer care is so important for brands wanting to increase audience awareness. It’s all about engagement.
Whether it’s capitalizing on a compliment or responding to a question, businesses shouldn’t leave customers hanging.
Do a Social Media Audit
While using social media, you need to take stock of your efforts so far. Asking yourself following questions is important.
What’s working, and what’s not?
Who is engaging with your posts?
Which networks does your target audience use?
How does your social media presence compare to your competitors?
Once you collect all answers to these questions, you’ll be ready to focus on What are the ways to improve?
Your audit should give you a clear picture of what purpose each of your social accounts serves to your audience. If the purpose of an account isn’t clear, think about whether it’s worth keeping?
Look for impostor accounts
During the audit, you may discover some fake accounts using your business name or the names of your products or the same pictures which you have used.
These imposters can be harmful to your brand
Report them.
You may want to get your Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts verified to ensure your fans know they are dealing with the real you and not that you posting copy content, pictures, posts.
I hope you found value in this article.
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