Introduction
A social media strategy is often overlooked by businesses, even though it is fundamental to success across social media platforms. In this post I will be explaining the simple steps you can take to ensure your business has the foundations set to having a successful social media presence which in return generate more: followers, traffic, leads and revenue.
Why your business needs a social media strategy
Your social media strategy will be the blueprint for all activity within social media, and will guide the process of creating content, engaging, and planning for your online social media presence.
A simple strategy will help your business tackle any pain points that are current within your social media management and then be used to iron them out in the future. Once created, the strategy should help identify any new pain points, set traceable goals, improve efficiency and allow you to track the success of your social media.
A strategy is also the perfect opportunity to set the rules within your business on what the purpose of your social media is, and in turn provide your team with guidelines on what goes out across your social media platforms.
The key steps to a successful social media strategy
1. Identify who your target audience is
Identifying your target audience will enable you to carry out the necessary due diligence to understand who that audience are. Using/identifying your buyers personas will also be key in this process.
Once the target audience has been identified you will begin to gather an understanding of what kind of posts your audience are best suited to and will set you up to create a more meaningful content plan.
2. Create a bank of content
A content bank can be used forever in your social media journey and will provide more depth when posting across platforms. Your first steps will be identifying what content is right for you.
We always advise with consistently writing meaningful blogs – The further you progress the more you will understand what to write the blogs about, customers pain points and common questions are always a good place to start.
Blogs can then also be used for content ideas to post across social media and provide an incentive to click through to your site.
Another content idea is to create educational pieces to support the blogs and posts. These may be videos, e books or even animations, anything to give downloadable content to your audience that identify a problem and provide a solution. Having this in place will boost social media engagement as it is meaningful and useful content.
3. Identify what social media channels are best for you
Just because there are multiple different social media channels you can use; it doesn’t mean you should use them all. You may think that you already know what channels are best for your business, but the social media strategy will help you identify whether certain platforms are worth the time you are putting into them.
Having measurable goals set for each platform will be key into identifying where your time is best spent. We advise looking at your employees’ strengths, what platforms have they got the most experience with? Knowing this will increase the quality of your online presence and may be key to your success.
Don’t take on too much. If you have identified 5 platforms to be beneficial, you don’t have to instantly begin to use them all. Start off with those that you are most comfortable with and grow into the new platforms, it is noticeable to the audience when content seems forced or rushed so keep it simple.
4. Have a content plan to work from
A content plan is a key component to a successful social media strategy. It is the base of where, what and when to post all of your content, it also prevents mistakes from happening when you post without any thought.
There are various tools out there like our social scheduling platform which allow you to upload content and schedule it for the correct time. Our platform will also do the hard work for you and identify the best time to post for your business. For example, an engaging post and a promotional post would have different recommended times, this is due to the AI identifying what profiles interact with certain posts and when they are most active online.
5. Identify your goals
Having measurables to work towards a goal is vital to growing on social media. Everyone will have different measurables and goals, so it is vital that you correctly identify your own.
Start off by looking at what you want to achieve, you may want more traffic to your site, you may want comments or followers.
Working out your averages is the perfect place to start, when you have the averages on your desired metrics you can then identify what posts perform better in certain areas and those that do not.
Don’t overcomplicate your goals – It is easy to do and easy to fall into the trap of measuring unnecessary elements. This will just cause confusion and unclear results that have no meaning, so keep it simple and only measure the vital pieces of information.
6. Experiment
Experimenting with your content is the key to finding what works and what doesn’t, you have to try new things in order to identify the winning formula. This isn’t a quick process, though. It can take a long time to understand what to do and in return get an engaged following, but if you keep experimenting with the content you put out, it will all fall into place.
The more content that is put out there, the more the social media strategy will change and evolve. It will all add up to having a fuller understanding of your audience and also your own business.
