Having a presence on social media nowadays is integral to running a business. It acts as a good headstart when it comes to making sure that your brand succeeds in today’s competitive world, which is primarily controlled by social media. In the last couple of years, especially ever since the pandemic started, companies started creating an online presence for themselves through social media accounts and pages to make up for the physical services that they were offering before, through the social platform.
A social media strategy is a sort of document that outlines your social media objectives and would help track to measure your progress so far. You could of course hire a professional social media strategist but you could also do this by yourself, from a digital marketing institute. With an increase in the attention that social media received, came the need for people to know more about it which they took care of, for the most part through enrolling themselves in a digital marketing course
How to create an effective social media strategy?
There are many ways to create a social media strategy as it varies from brand to brand. Whatever works for them is an effective strategy, but below is a strategy that has proved to be effective before:
1. Nail down your objectives
2. Audit where you are currently
3. Create customer personas
4. Identify the right KPIs and metrics
5. Have clarity about your channel’s purpose
6. Identify your platforms
7. Planning and content creation
8. Go live
9. Measure, monitor, analyze and amend
1. Write down your objectives
Before you get started, you should sit down and figure out exactly what you are hoping to achieve with your social channels or platforms. This is where you should make SMART goals:
S (Specific) – When it comes to prioritizing and setting goals, it is important that you are clear about what you want to accomplish, as it will simplify exactly what you are trying to conceptualize. For example, instead of simply stating that you want to ‘increase Instagram followers’, set the target ‘increase Instagram followers to 10,000’ instead.
M (Measurable) – For each goal you set, keep in mind an efficient method to measure your progress and success.
A (Achievable) – With social media goals, you will want to choose those that are challenging in a positive way, but not completely unreachable as that would lead to wastage of resources and a fall in the employee morale rate.
R (Relevant) – Social media marketing works best when it goes hand in hand with the rest of your business’s goals and objectives. So make sure that your social media goals support your business goals.
T (Timely) – Make sure to include a deadline to keep everyone accountable when you are setting goals. Adding in specific milestones (as mentioned in the first step) every once in a while is also a great way to make sure everyone is collectively working to achieve them.
2. Look over your current progress
Before you start planning your updated and modified strategy, it is integral to the plan that you gain an in-depth understanding of how your current social media channels are performing, so you can see your current status and how much more you need to achieve to get to your goal. You can abide by the following steps:
A. Your recent progress and results
First, you need to list down all of your social media platforms, accounts and handles so you know exactly what you are supposed to look through following which, look for the following for each channel:
- What types of content perform best on which channel?
- What types of customers are interacting with you the most?
- Which platforms are driving the most traffic to your website?
From making sure you have the same handles, right logos, graphics, and tone of voice depending on the platform, it’s all about presenting a unified front, so your customers can find and remember you. Keep in mind that your tone and content will differ depending on your audience and the social platforms that you are using. Don’t forget to look for any duplicate or old accounts, as well as those set up by ex-employees as this can cause confusion for the customers.
B. Competitor analysis
While it’s great to keep check of your success and growth, you also need to know how you perform in comparison to your competitors as it would help you offer insights into what works within your industry as a whole and see if there are any areas of improvement.. you can look into the following criteria:
- Identify your competitors: you should already have a brief idea of who your competitors are, but if not, use Google or other keyword tools to search for keywords your customers. For a more accurate comparison, remember to only compare your social strategies against those of businesses who are actively using social media as it would be easier to get more updates on their strategies and plans.
- Analyse their activity: take a look at the specific way they use social media. Notice how long it takes for them to respond to comments or questions, and their post frequency. By doing thorough research on their social media uploads, posts, and how they conduct themselves on social media, you will gain a much clearer picture of your industry as a whole.
3. Create customer personas
While you might already have defined your audience, it is still a good idea to create detailed buyer demographics to fully understand your customers’ needs and design your social media strategy accordingly. To find the relevant information, use your native analytics by collecting the most important data from your social media channels including:
- Demographics
- Locations
- Language
- Attitudes
- Interests
- Beliefs
- Instagram insights and demographics
4. Identify the right KPIs and metrics
From generating leads to establishing online authority, there are many metrics you can track. Here are some examples:
- If you aim to improve your brand awareness, then tracking metrics such as impressions, shares, post reach, and brand mentions is a very good idea.
- If your overall goal is to increase conversions, you’ll be looking at traffic to the site via social media source, conversion rate, click-through-rate, and bounce rate
- If you’re aiming to use your social channels to build and manage an engaged community, then you’ll need to track metrics like shares and retweets, brand mentions, audience growth rate, post engagement rate, and response rate.
5. Have clarity about your channel’s purpose
Being concise regarding the purpose of your social media channels can help make it much easier to decide the type of content you want to create and share.
Platform purposes:
- LinkedIn: for providing value to businesses and individuals in the form of longer-form content and thought leadership positioning
- Twitter: for interaction and engagement: sharing product and company updates, along with relevant industry news
- Facebook: for connecting with your audience, sharing helpful advice, and starting conversations
- Instagram: for engagement, inspiration, visibility, and connecting with your customers
6. Identify your platforms
While it can be tempting to include everything in your social media strategy and see what works, it is a much better idea to take a look at what’s working for you and modify and customize your strategy according to that instead. From there, you can figure out exactly which social media platforms you must use to expand your reach. While having an active presence across multiple platforms is good, it is less practical because you would be spending time and resources even on platforms that don’t garner a lot of attention or new customers.
Always remember that every social platform is directed for a different purpose, audience, and type of content. So always make sure that you choose the right one and don’t lose sight of what your goals are.
7. Planning and content creation
This is, unfortunately, the building block for most businesses. But by following all the steps above before this, you will be at ease knowing that the content you are creating is made keeping your ideal audience in mind. Organize your social activities to reach your goals efficiently. It could be creating video content or engaging in influencer marketing, but make sure you always keep your objectives and audience in consideration at all times.
8. Go Live
After nailing down your objectives, getting your platforms sorted out, and have created your content, a great way to roll out your strategy across your various active social channels is to invest in a social scheduling tool which is a very easy way to make sure that you’re sharing a wide range of content. after this, there is just one thing left to do- keep an eye on everything that is happening- likes, tweets, shares, etc.
9. Measure, Monitor, Analyze and Amend
The key to having a successful online presence is to constantly monitor your progress. When it comes to social media, it’s all about testing and going back because even after thorough research, there is no guarantee as to how things will turn out. Your social media strategy should be constantly improving and changing and remember to continue to tweak and edit your strategy a little to figure out what best resonates with your audience as well as what works best for you.
Like many other things, there are many ways to create a social media strategy but the best strategy isn’t the one that you pay a lot of money for or the one that the biggest companies follow. The best strategy is the one that helps you achieve your desired results and the best part about this is that you don’t need to hire someone to do it. You can learn it yourself through practical digital marketing training instead of on recorded sessions as it would allow you to communicate with the professionally experienced mentor.
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