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How To Create A Social Media Strategy

How To Create A Social Media Strategy

The word strategy might sound a bit daunting but putting together a business strategy and a marketing strategy is a vital part of any business success. To see business growth and success over a period of time, it’s vital to plan out everything that needs to be done in order to achieve this.

The same goes with a social media strategy. This will fall into your marketing planning but social media is such a large part everyday life that it needs to be incorporated into the mix. People are mobile and people carry their mobile devices with them wherever they go. In order to reach a target audience directly – you need to be at the heart of where they are.

What is a social media strategy?

The basis to a strategy is a summary and plan of everything that you plan to do in order to see a result or achieve a certain goal. It will guide the way that you manage your social media, the way you engage with the audience and will allow you to see if you on track or need to change direction.

This will play a part in every post, tweet or comment that you do within all your social media platforms, keeping the same tone of voice throughout.

Here are 5 ways to get you started with a social media strategy:

Get SMART

Each of your goals should be:

  • Specific
  • Measurable
  • Attainable
  • Relevant
  • Time-bound

This is the smart framework that will align your goals with real achievements, rather than guessing or taking things by chance. Every goal or action you take should be measured against the smart framework knowing that you will keep everything tied together – with a plan for how to execute details.

The social media plan needs to align with your overall marketing strategy. This can be started by establishing 3-4 goals that you want to achieve and then working out a plan of how to achieve these.

Love your audience

The most vital stage of your social media plan comes down to understanding your audience. In order to meet their needs and provide a service that they will actually want to buy into, you need to fully understanding them. When you start to understand and love what they love, sharing tips, advice or general information that they are actually interested in – then they will start to engage, share and comment – giving you ground to be able to give great customer service and to build working relationships.

If you love your audience and they know it – they will start to love and trust your brand, making it so much easier to build your business and see growth for the future.

Conduct a social media audit

If you’ve already been using social media for your business but are finding it difficult to grow or establish a connection with your audience, then perhaps it’s time to do a social media audit in order to find out what’s going on.

What does this entail? Try answering these questions…

Look through all your social media channels – Facebook, Twitter, instagram, Google+, Pinterest, YouTube, Quora and make a list of all of them.

Next to each one, write down the number of followers

  • Who is connecting with you on your social media platforms?
  • What is working – what is not working?
  • Is your target audience present on these channels?
  • Do text or image posts create the best engagement?
  • Am I providing a level of customer of service on every channel?
  • Are all my profiles branded?
  • How does your social media compare to your competitors accounts?

Answering these questions will give you a good overall analysis of where you currently stand within your social media marketing. You can then use this to better plan out your social media strategy as you now know what is working and what’s not. You now know where you main target audience is based and which channels will help you reach them quicker and more effectively.

Create engaging content

Work out what works for your audience in terms of content. Does their demographics determine what type of posts they would like to see?

In most cases, visuals catch the attention of the target audience. If they are presented with something that is eye-catching and immediately says ‘wow’ to them, they are more likely to engage or to share your content.

Depending on what social media platform you are using, see what works best by testing different mediums, the posts that create the most amount of feedback and engagement are the types that you need to build into your social media strategy. You could be the best copywriter in the world but if your posts are not grabbing the attention of the audience, they are not going to be effective. Test, test and test again to see what works. Create images that are powerful and have impact. Create images that speak directly to the customer – giving them solutions or advice that they want to hear. Text can be incorporated into the images and of course any text or wording alongside these images need to be just as impactful as the visuals. Give depth and knowledge, provide value in every post you create.

Learn from your competitors – find inspiration

Yes your business is unique and you need to come across as providing a unique service to every customer you come into contact with. But this doesn’t mean that you can’t learn from other experts in your industry. Establishing your audience and finding what they engage best with will give you grounding for your strategy. Finding inspiration from others can provide you with valuable insights that will help boost your brand awareness. Don’t forget that the key to social media is engagement – it is SOCIAL for a reason!

If you’d like help in putting together a social media strategy for your business or brand, we’d love to chat with you. Get in touch to find out more.

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