How To Create Your Social Media Strategy
8 Simple Steps To Create Your Social Media Strategy
1. Set Smart Goals
The first step to creating a winning strategy is to establish your objectives and goals. Without goals, you have no way to measure success or return on investment (ROI). So, set your social media goals that align with your objectives.
SMART is the keyword here, and it's here to help you remember that each of your goals should be:
Specific
Measurable
Attainable
Relevant
Time-bound
This is the framework that will guide your actions and ensure they lead to real business results.
Focus on tracking the meaningful metrics
Vanity metrics like retweets and likes are easy to track, but it’s hard to prove their real value. Instead, focus instead on targets such as leads generated, web referrals, and conversion rates.
You may want to track different goals for different channels or even different uses of each channel.
Make sure to align your social media goals with your overall marketing strategy. This will make it easier for you to show the value of your work and get executive buy-in and investment.
Take a look at the following board to see examples of the business objectives, goals, and metrics.
Start developing your social media marketing plan by writing down at least three goals for social media.
2. Learn as much as you can about your audience
Create audience personas
Knowing who your audience—and ideal customer—is and what they want to see on social is key to creating content that they will like, comment on, and share. It’s also significant if you want to turn social media followers into customers for your business.
Creating audience/buyer personas will allow you to think of your potential fans, followers, and customers as real people with actual wants and needs. And this will allow you to think more clearly about what to offer them.
Collect real-world data
Let assumptions aside. Thinking Facebook is a better network for reaching the Baby Boomers than the Millennials? Well, the numbers show that Millennials still outnumber Boomers on the platform.
Social media analytics can also give a ton of helpful information about who your followers are, where they live, which languages they speak, and how they interact with your brand. These insights enable you to refine your strategy and better target your social ads.
3. Research your competition
Your competitors are, probably, already using social media—and that means you can learn from what they’re already doing.
Run a competitive analysis
A competitive analysis will help you to understand who the competition is and what they’re doing well (and their mistakes). You’ll get a good sense of what’s expected in your industry, which will help you set social media targets of your own.
As you track competitor accounts and relevant industry keywords, you may notice shifts in the way these channels are used. Or, you might find a specific post or campaign that really hits the mark—or totally bombs. Keep an eye on this data and use to it evaluate your own goals and strategies.
The competitor analysis will also help you spot new opportunities. For example, maybe one of your competitors is dominant on Instagram but has put little effort into Twitter or Facebook. You might want to focus on the platforms where your audience is underserved, rather than trying to win fans away from a dominant member.
4. Do a social media audit
Check your current efforts. If you’re already using social media tools, you need to take a step back and look at what you’ve already done and achieved. Ask yourself the following questions:
What’s working, and what’s not?
Who is connecting with you on social?
Which networks does your target audience use?
How does your social media presence compare to that of your competitors?
Once you have answers to all these questions, you’ll have a good starting point for planning how to improve your results.
Your audit should give you a good understanding of what purpose each of your social accounts serves. If the purpose of an account isn’t clear, think about whether it’s worth keeping it.
To help you make the decision, ask yourself the following things:
Is my audience here?
If so, how are they using this platform?
Can I use this account to help achieve meaningful business goals?
Asking these questions will help keep your strategy on track and focused.
Look for fake accounts
Throughout the audit, you may discover fake accounts using your business name or the names of your products.
These imposters can be damaging to your brand, capturing followers that should be yours. Report them. You may want to get your Facebook, Instagram and Twitter accounts verified to ensure your fans and followers know they are dealing with the real you.
5. Set up accounts and improve your existing profiles
Determine which networks to use (and how to use them)
As you decide which social channels to use, you will also need to define your strategy for each network.
For example, Benefit Cosmetics’ social media manager, Angela Purcaro, told eMarketer: “For our makeup tutorials … we’re all about Snapchat and Instagram Stories. Twitter, on the other hand, is designated for customer service.”
It’s a good exercise to create mission statements for each network. These one-sentence declarations will help you focus on a very specific goal for each account on each social network.
Example: “We will use Facebook ads to target a specific audience in order to increase sales.”
One more: “We will use Instagram for promoting and sharing our company culture to help with recruitment and employee advocacy.”
If you can’t create a firm mission statement for a specific social network, you may want to rethink whether that network is worth it.
Set up or optimize your accounts
Once you’ve decided which platforms to focus on, it’s time to create your profiles—or improve the existing ones so they align with your strategic plan.
Make sure you fill out all profile fields
Use keywords people will use to search for your business
Use images that are correctly sized for each social media network.
6. Find your inspiration
It’s important that your brand be unique, but you can still get some inspiration from other businesses that are great on social.
Who do you enjoy following on social media? What do they do that compels people to engage and share their content?
For example, National Geographic is one of the best on Instagram, mixing stunning visuals with compelling captions.
Then there’s Shopify. The e-commerce brand uses Facebook to sell itself by showcasing customer stories and case studies.
Each of these accounts needs to have a consistent voice, tone, and style. Consistency is key to helping your followers understand what to expect from you. They’ll understand why they should keep following you and what value they will get from doing so. It can also help keep your branding consistent even when you have multiple people working on your team.
Your followers' opinions are really valuable. Ask them!
Customers can also offer social media inspiration. What are your target customers talking about online? What can you learn about their wants and needs? If you have existing social channels, you could also ask your existing followers what they want from you. Just make sure that you follow through and deliver what they ask for.
7. Create a social media content calendar
Sharing great content is vital, of course, but it’s really important to have a plan in place for when you’ll share content to get the maximum impact. Your social media content schedule also needs to consider for the time you’ll spend interacting with the audience (yet you need to go for some spontaneous engagement as well).
Create a posting plan
Your social media content calendar records the dates and times at which you will publish types of content on each platform. It’s the perfect place to plan all of your social media activities—from images and link sharing to blog posts and videos. It includes both your day-to-day posting and content for social media campaigns. Your schedule ensures your posts are spaced out properly and published at the best times.
Once you have your calendar ready, use scheduling tools to prepare your posting in advance rather than updating constantly throughout the day. This allows you to craft the language and format of your posts rather than writing them on the fly whenever you find the time.
8. Test, evaluate, and adjust
Your social media strategy is a really important part of your business, and you can’t believe you’ll get it exactly right on the first try. As you start to implement your plan and track your results, you may find that some strategies don’t work as well as you’d expected, while others are working even better than expected.
Re-evaluate, test, and do it all again
Once data starts coming in, use it to re-evaluate your strategy frequently. You can also use this information to test different posts, campaigns, and strategies against one another. Regular testing allows you to see what works and what doesn’t, so you can adjust your strategy in real-time.
Ask your followers, email list, and website visitors whether you’re meeting their needs and expectations, and what they’d like to see more of. Then make sure to deliver on what they tell you.
In the social field, things change very quickly. New networks rise, while others go through significant demographic changes. Your business will go through stages of change as well. All of this means that your social media strategy should be a living document that you look at frequently and modify as needed. Refer to it often to keep you on track, but don’t be afraid to make a few changes so that it better reflects new goals, tools, or plans.
When you update your social strategy, make sure to let everyone on your team know. That way they can all work together to help your business make the most of your social media accounts.
1. Set Smart Goals
The first step to creating a winning strategy is to establish your objectives and goals. Without goals, you have no way to measure success or return on investment (ROI). So, set your social media goals that align with your objectives.
SMART is the keyword here, and it's here to help you remember that each of your goals should be:
Specific
Measurable
Attainable
Relevant
Time-bound
This is the framework that will guide your actions and ensure they lead to real business results.
Focus on tracking the meaningful metrics
Vanity metrics like retweets and likes are easy to track, but it’s hard to prove their real value. Instead, focus instead on targets such as leads generated, web referrals, and conversion rates.
You may want to track different goals for different channels or even different uses of each channel.
Make sure to align your social media goals with your overall marketing strategy. This will make it easier for you to show the value of your work and get executive buy-in and investment.
Take a look at the following board to see examples of the business objectives, goals, and metrics.
Start developing your social media marketing plan by writing down at least three goals for social media.
2. Learn as much as you can about your audience
Create audience personas
Knowing who your audience—and ideal customer—is and what they want to see on social is key to creating content that they will like, comment on, and share. It’s also significant if you want to turn social media followers into customers for your business.
Creating audience/buyer personas will allow you to think of your potential fans, followers, and customers as real people with actual wants and needs. And this will allow you to think more clearly about what to offer them.
Collect real-world data
Let assumptions aside. Thinking Facebook is a better network for reaching the Baby Boomers than the Millennials? Well, the numbers show that Millennials still outnumber Boomers on the platform.
Social media analytics can also give a ton of helpful information about who your followers are, where they live, which languages they speak, and how they interact with your brand. These insights enable you to refine your strategy and better target your social ads.
3. Research your competition
Your competitors are, probably, already using social media—and that means you can learn from what they’re already doing.
Run a competitive analysis
A competitive analysis will help you to understand who the competition is and what they’re doing well (and their mistakes). You’ll get a good sense of what’s expected in your industry, which will help you set social media targets of your own.
As you track competitor accounts and relevant industry keywords, you may notice shifts in the way these channels are used. Or, you might find a specific post or campaign that really hits the mark—or totally bombs. Keep an eye on this data and use to it evaluate your own goals and strategies.
The competitor analysis will also help you spot new opportunities. For example, maybe one of your competitors is dominant on Instagram but has put little effort into Twitter or Facebook. You might want to focus on the platforms where your audience is underserved, rather than trying to win fans away from a dominant member.
4. Do a social media audit
Check your current efforts. If you’re already using social media tools, you need to take a step back and look at what you’ve already done and achieved. Ask yourself the following questions:
What’s working, and what’s not?
Who is connecting with you on social?
Which networks does your target audience use?
How does your social media presence compare to that of your competitors?
Once you have answers to all these questions, you’ll have a good starting point for planning how to improve your results.
Your audit should give you a good understanding of what purpose each of your social accounts serves. If the purpose of an account isn’t clear, think about whether it’s worth keeping it.
To help you make the decision, ask yourself the following things:
Is my audience here?
If so, how are they using this platform?
Can I use this account to help achieve meaningful business goals?
Asking these questions will help keep your strategy on track and focused.
Look for fake accounts
Throughout the audit, you may discover fake accounts using your business name or the names of your products.
These imposters can be damaging to your brand, capturing followers that should be yours. Report them. You may want to get your Facebook, Instagram and Twitter accounts verified to ensure your fans and followers know they are dealing with the real you.
5. Set up accounts and improve your existing profiles
Determine which networks to use (and how to use them)
As you decide which social channels to use, you will also need to define your strategy for each network.
For example, Benefit Cosmetics’ social media manager, Angela Purcaro, told eMarketer: “For our makeup tutorials … we’re all about Snapchat and Instagram Stories. Twitter, on the other hand, is designated for customer service.”
It’s a good exercise to create mission statements for each network. These one-sentence declarations will help you focus on a very specific goal for each account on each social network.
Example: “We will use Facebook ads to target a specific audience in order to increase sales.”
One more: “We will use Instagram for promoting and sharing our company culture to help with recruitment and employee advocacy.”
If you can’t create a firm mission statement for a specific social network, you may want to rethink whether that network is worth it.
Set up or optimize your accounts
Once you’ve decided which platforms to focus on, it’s time to create your profiles—or improve the existing ones so they align with your strategic plan.
Make sure you fill out all profile fields
Use keywords people will use to search for your business
Use images that are correctly sized for each social media network.
6. Find your inspiration
It’s important that your brand be unique, but you can still get some inspiration from other businesses that are great on social.
Who do you enjoy following on social media? What do they do that compels people to engage and share their content?
For example, National Geographic is one of the best on Instagram, mixing stunning visuals with compelling captions.
Then there’s Shopify. The e-commerce brand uses Facebook to sell itself by showcasing customer stories and case studies.
Each of these accounts needs to have a consistent voice, tone, and style. Consistency is key to helping your followers understand what to expect from you. They’ll understand why they should keep following you and what value they will get from doing so. It can also help keep your branding consistent even when you have multiple people working on your team.
Your followers' opinions are really valuable. Ask them!
Customers can also offer social media inspiration. What are your target customers talking about online? What can you learn about their wants and needs? If you have existing social channels, you could also ask your existing followers what they want from you. Just make sure that you follow through and deliver what they ask for.
7. Create a social media content calendar
Sharing great content is vital, of course, but it’s really important to have a plan in place for when you’ll share content to get the maximum impact. Your social media content schedule also needs to consider for the time you’ll spend interacting with the audience (yet you need to go for some spontaneous engagement as well).
Create a posting plan
Your social media content calendar records the dates and times at which you will publish types of content on each platform. It’s the perfect place to plan all of your social media activities—from images and link sharing to blog posts and videos. It includes both your day-to-day posting and content for social media campaigns. Your schedule ensures your posts are spaced out properly and published at the best times.
Once you have your calendar ready, use scheduling tools to prepare your posting in advance rather than updating constantly throughout the day. This allows you to craft the language and format of your posts rather than writing them on the fly whenever you find the time.
8. Test, evaluate, and adjust
Your social media strategy is a really important part of your business, and you can’t believe you’ll get it exactly right on the first try. As you start to implement your plan and track your results, you may find that some strategies don’t work as well as you’d expected, while others are working even better than expected.
Re-evaluate, test, and do it all again
Once data starts coming in, use it to re-evaluate your strategy frequently. You can also use this information to test different posts, campaigns, and strategies against one another. Regular testing allows you to see what works and what doesn’t, so you can adjust your strategy in real-time.
Ask your followers, email list, and website visitors whether you’re meeting their needs and expectations, and what they’d like to see more of. Then make sure to deliver on what they tell you.
In the social field, things change very quickly. New networks rise, while others go through significant demographic changes. Your business will go through stages of change as well. All of this means that your social media strategy should be a living document that you look at frequently and modify as needed. Refer to it often to keep you on track, but don’t be afraid to make a few changes so that it better reflects new goals, tools, or plans.
When you update your social strategy, make sure to let everyone on your team know. That way they can all work together to help your business make the most of your social media accounts.
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