What is a Social Media Strategy?
What is a social media strategy? A social media strategy is a guide on how you plan to take advantage of digital platforms. Having a social media strategy is an essential step to achieving your business goals. This article is your one-stop manual of everything you need to know to develop a successful social media strategy from scratch. Whether you’re the founder of a startup company or a marketer who’s stuck in a pit, read on as we help you bring your business to the next level. Before we dive in, let us first understand why having a social media strategy is so important.
Why have a social media strategy?
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, it’s pretty obvious that our current era is populated by digital technologies. According to reports:
Over 3.8 billion people are active on social media.
78% of consumers visit the physical stores of a brand they follow online.
84% of millennials are more prone to purchase from a brand they follow online.
No longer should you dwell on traditional marketing strategies — this is the time of evolution! The power of social media is that it helps people connect more than ever. By expanding your business marketing efforts onto social media, you immediately make yourself discoverable to your customers, partners, and prospects. Social media gives you the opportunity to build brand awareness and share your products and services at everyone’s convenience. Think about it, your business is now accessible to anyone, any time, anywhere, in just a few clicks.
Social media allows you to be more personal and direct. With the advancements of social media algorithms — the way posts are sorted on a user’s feed based on relevancy — you are more likely to branch out towards the right type of audience that your business targets. The best part about social media is that no matter how large your competitor is, they will not have leverage over you. It’s a completely fair playing field! For all you know, your post can be found right next to an international brand that has a million-dollar marketing budget (beat that!).
Now that you realize the potentials of utilizing social media, let’s plan how we can ensure a social media strategy is successful.
How to develop a social media strategy
Just like any other planning, you want your social media strategy to be as detailed and organized as possible. It may feel overwhelming in the beginning, but we can assure you that your social media efforts will be greatly reflected in your company’s ROI (return on investment). Though a word of precaution: Do not take any short-cuts.
Identify your buyer persona
The first step is to identify your buyer persona — who is your ideal customer?
Clarifying your target audience will direct you in various ways. For example, which social media platform to use, what content to post, and what message to share.
To better understand your buyer persona, you would need to know all of their demographics. This includes their age, gender, race, marital status, income, and occupation. If possible, you can go the extra mile and uncover your customer’s psychographics. Psychographics are related to cognitive aspects such as interests, values, and objections.
By revealing this information, you essentially outline your customer’s buying habits. Do they prefer online shopping? Which social media platform are they most active on? What attracts them to your products and services? Now that you can predict your customers more accurately, you can steer your social media marketing strategy in the right direction.
Align social media goals with business goals
People tend to mix up social media goals as business goals. Your social media goals directly or indirectly contribute to your business goals. Reaching 200K followers on Instagram should not be your business goal. This is simply a key milestone of your social media goal which might bring you closer to your business goals.
In order to determine your social media goals, you need to have a solid business goal. A good rule of thumb is to adhere to SMART goals.
SMART goals are:
Specific
Measurable
Achievable
Relevant
Timely
An example of a SMART business goal is to increase sales turnover to a minimum of $2000 per month within two years.
Choose your social media channels
Spoiler: You don’t need to be on every social media channel!
Deciding which social media channels to advertise your business on might be the most exciting and critical decision in your social media strategy. Depending on your business and target audience, you might find that certain social media channels are more efficient or less efficient than others. As such, you have to truly understand the strengths and weaknesses of each social channel. It’s a good idea to familiarize yourself with their various functions as well.
To cut you some slack, here’s a brief description of each of the most popular social media channels according to Hubspot:
Strengths:
With over 2.45 billion users, Facebook is the world’s most widely used social media channel.
Facebook offers some of the best advertising tools which can be used across other social platforms.
Business page benefits include access to insights data which is used to analyze your engagements, plus, customers can provide you with reviews.
Facebook groups are also a great way to build a captive audience and a sense of community.
Weakness:
The Facebook algorithm prioritizes content specific to family and friends.
Engagement rates on Facebook have been declining dramatically.
YouTube
Strengths:
With over 2 billion users, Youtube is the second largest social network.
It boasts the second largest search engine in the world, right behind Google.
This helps with SEO as it has the highest traffic referral rates.
You can monetize your videos if they go viral.
You can also opt for interstitial advertising — short clips that appear before a video.
Weakness:
Time-consuming to produce videos.
Strict guidelines which restrict what you can post on your channel.
Any advertisements can be added on your video. Meaning, a competitor might have the chance to meddle with your content.
Strengths:
With over 1 billion users, Instagram is the third-largest and fastest-growing social media channel.
Includes features like Stories, Highlights, Live-Videos, filters, and shoppable tags.
Instagram’s business account enables links to contacts, websites, and the shop button.
Weakness:
The main demographic of users are between the ages of 18 to 24.
A Facebook business page is required to create a business account.
There are a plethora of social media channels out there. Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Snapchat, Tiktok… the list goes on. Don’t be afraid to research and experiment on various platforms to find out which one is the best fit for your social media strategy.
Plan your content
You want to post content that your audience can resonate with. Don’t post something for the sake of posting — you want to create an impact.
Before creating and publishing anything, you should conduct a content audit on the social media channels that you have chosen. In your content audit, look at audience demographics, referral traffics, publishing metrics, engagement metrics, and any other channel-specific metrics. You can also refer to your top-performing posts and your competitor’s posts. These findings will highlight the type of content that your audience responds to best.
When you learn what your customers want, all you have to do is deliver. But don’t let this take the fun out of social media. The internet can be super unpredictable times. Always be creative on different types of content. You never know when you might just start a new trend.
Practice social listening, monitoring, and engagement
Now that you’re on social media, you have to keep up with the trends. These three steps dictate how you perform and build your online reputation. They also ensure that nothing backfires (yes, things can get quite messy online).
Social listening is keeping track of what’s happening across the Internet. What’s the new in? What are people talking about now? Be it a new meme or a political issue, you should be in the loop.
Social monitoring is looking for conversations related to your brand. Including your products, your employees, your competitors, and your customers. Lookout for conversations that risk damaging your brand and resolve them ASAP.
Social engagement is communicating with your community and building relationships. Strengthen your bond with your customers by showing that you care. Like their posts, reply to their comments, and follow them back.
Specify your KPIs (key performance indicators)
A KPI is a quantifiable value that evaluates your progress in fulfilling your business objectives. KPIs are useful for helping you make better decisions in your social media strategy now as well as in the future. Specify your KPIs to make sure you’re on the right track!
There are four main categories of KPIs in social media:
1. Reach
Can be measured by follower counts, impressions, mentions, and shares.
2. Engagement
Can be measured by likes/favourites, comments, sharing/retweets, ratings, reviews, and inbound website links.
3. Return On Investment (ROI)
Can be measured by direct sales revenue, lead conversions, customer support cost, and customer lifetime value.
4. Retention And Loyalty
Can be measured by ratings, reviews, resolutions, service level agreement, and customer satisfaction.
The social media world is constantly changing, and your business needs to adapt to these changes to stay afloat. Therefore, you should be reviewing your KPIs at least once every 6 to 12 months.
Find the best social media tools
Managing social media is a lot more responsibility than you think. But the good news is there is a multitude of social media tools that are programmed to simplify your job. From monitoring analytics, keeping track of influencers, scheduling posts, managing conversations, and cloning posts for resharing, there are tools to assist you. And guess what, most of them are free!
Some free tools you should consider having are Google Alerts, Google’s Campaign URL Builder, Canva, Hashtagify, Twitter’s Tweetdeck, and Social Mention.
Test out which social media tools work best for you. They are meant to help. So you might as well make the most out of them.
Embark on your social media strategy
Now that you know the ins and outs to develop a successful social media strategy, it’s time to get started! The first step tends to feel unassuming, but that’s the beauty of making a difference. As long as you’re following this step-by-step guide, you are set for success.
Have confidence in your abilities!
FAQs
Do I really need a social media strategy?
It is highly recommended to plan out a social media strategy as it increases your chances of success when building your empire online. Just like the saying goes: “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” You definitely do not want your efforts to go to waste. Planning will help you avoid potential roadblocks.
How do I know which social channels my target audience is most active on?
Once you have identified your target audience, you can run a social media audit to determine which social channels are most popular among them. This would require a great understanding of your target audience’s demographics and psychographics.
Other than Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, which other channels should I be on?
There is an endless list of social channels across the globe. The major social channels are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, and Reddit. Of course, you’re not limited to these channels. Depending on your business and target audience, you might find another social channel that is more effective. Don’t be afraid to experiment.
How often should I post new content on my social channels?
It is important to update your page regularly so that your audience does not forget about you. For example, studies report that the optimal number of posts on Facebook is one per day, but this depends on your business structure and target audience. Posting too often might feel spammy and cause users to unfollow the same way posting irregularly may cause your audience to lose interest.
As a general rule of thumb, begin by posting three times a week and see how your posts are performing. If needed, you can always increase this number as you learn more about your failures and successes.
What if my strategy isn’t working?
It is common to find that your efforts are futile, especially when you are working with something new. If you find that your strategy isn’t working, there are many factors to consider: Are you adapting to social media changes? Are you confusing consistency with success? Are you working on the wrong social channel?
Most strategies fail because certain steps are missing. So go back to the drawing board, identify your strategy’s weaknesses, and work on improving them.
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