Everyone is on social media – ranging from casual users to global corporations. While some use social media networks for their personal needs, others use them for business. Those who want to attract and keep customers, or to develop expertise through relevant and accurate information should not only be present on social media but should first have a precise social media strategy. Without a strategy, a business will have difficulties in building brand awareness, gaining and engaging new customers, or increasing sales. Below are 5 simple yet significant steps that will help you design a social media strategy.
1. Define Your Business’ Social Media Goals
Creating a social media strategy is not only about publishing posts on a new product, service or sale. It is a meticulous plan of how you are going to engage and interact with your customers. Without having a clear and precise idea of what you want to achieve with the social media, you will fail. Besides, bear in mind that every goal needs a different set of actions. For example, building brand awareness is different from generating new leads or growing your revenue. Make sure that your goals are SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timely). Tie your social media goals with the overall goals of your business – discuss touching points with the sales and marketing department.
2. Perform Your Social Media Audit
Before mapping out your social media strategy, analyze how you use social media and see what is working, what is failing and what you could improve. Performing your social media audit involves finding out who is connecting to you on social media, which social media your target audience visits, and how your social media presence differs from your competitors. It is also important to do research on unauthorized pages linked to your company or service, such as fan sites or malicious sites undermining your reputation.
3. Define Your Content Strategy
Having completed the three steps, start developing a comprehensive and coherent content strategy for your social media campaign. To create a successful content strategy, consider the following: content you want to post and promote, frequency of posting, target audience, people responsible for creating the content and content’s promotion. An integral part of your content strategy is an editorial calendar that includes dates when you plan to publish Facebook or Instagram posts, blog posts or any other content.
4. Analyze and Track Your Progress
On the day when you launched your social media campaign, start checking the analytics to see how the campaign is performing. It is a mistake to analyze the campaign at the end because you might miss the chance of necessary adjustments. Choose the best analytics tool you feel comfortable working with and figure out engaged audiences (among useful analytics tools are Google Analytics or Facebook Insights). Also, remember to focus on analytics matching your goals. In this way, you are sure that you are going the right direction.
5. Adjust Your Strategy
When analyzing your current campaign, figure out what is working, and what needs revision and improvement. Do not settle with what does not work - interpret the collected data and rewrite your content strategy. Better to adjust and refine than stick with the old ways. Throughout your social media campaign use analytics, and keep developing and adjusting your social media strategy. List what worked well and helped you reach your goal, what did not, define a new goal for the next period and list the changes you want to introduce to your social media strategy.
With these 5 easy steps you can develop a social media strategy for your business that will bring positive results.