Creating a social media strategy has become a necessity for businesses, irrespective of their size or intricacies. This is primarily because it is the best avenue to reach a target audience. To further elaborate, social media is the best place to connect with an audience, foster loyalty, and promote brand awareness or drive business in general.
On the contrary, many businesses initiate social media promotions without proper planning or strategizing. The main downside to this approach is that it leads to wasted materials and missed opportunities. That said, the primary advantage of having a marketing strategy, especially in SEO and AI, is that it will allow the business to flourish and yield results, as opposed to simply being active on an online platform.
In this post, we will cover a number of different aspects, such as the importance of having a social media strategy and how to effectively create one. With that said, let’s get right on to it.
Understanding Social Media Strategy
To best define it, a social media strategy is a comprehensive document that focuses on a brand’s targets, the means needed to achieve them, and the metrics needed to evaluate success. Posts should not be made arbitrarily, instead, these should be done in a cohesive manner with set business aims.
Think of it as a roadmap that answers questions like:
- Why are you using social media?
- Who are you trying to reach?
- What type of content will resonate with your audience?
- Which platforms are best for your brand?
- How will you measure success?
This plan will not only rescue you from wasting time but also help you achieve growth through social media.
Key Benefits of Social Media Strategy
Here are a few of the most crucial advantages of having a social media plan:
1) Increased Brand Awareness
Social media platforms provide the best way to grow your business. These platforms have over 4.9 billion users globally and marketers are making the most of Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and Linkedin to grow their brands and businesses. With this plan, you will never miss out on putting your business in front of the right eyes.
2) Improved Interaction with Audience
Not knowing your audience well often leads to poor engagement, and content marketing. With a strategy, you will be able to push out content that your audience actually wants to see leading to more likes, comments, shares, and saves.
3) Increased Website Visitors and Higher Conversion Rates
Social media does not only create noise; it directs traffic to your website. An effective use of CTAs (Call-to-Action), including CTAs, clickable links, and ads can change followers to paying customers.
4) Nurtured Customer Connections
Social media provides an opportunity to advance a two-way conversation with the people you serve. Trust and loyalty can be established by participating in discussions, reacting to posts, and resolving customer’s problems.
5) Makes Decisions Based on Analytics
An effective strategy incorporates keeping track of metrics such as reach, engagement, and ROI. These figures help you adjust your strategy and allocate resources to strategies that succeed.
Social Media Strategy Building Steps
Constructing an effective social media strategy can be daunting, but doing so in steps makes the work much more manageable. Here’s how you can do it:
Step 1: Define your Goals
Begin by stating what you want to accomplish with social media. Employ the SMART goal setting to make your objectives Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound.
For example:
- Increase Instagram followers by 20% in three months.
- Drive 1,000 clicks to the website from social media in 30 days.
- Achieve a 10% engagement rate on LinkedIn posts this quarter.
Step 2: Identify the Audience
To create content that resonates, you need to know who you’re talking to. Use data to identify your target audience’s:
- Demographics: Age, gender, location, income, etc.
- Psychographics: Interests, hobbies, values, and challenges.
- Online Behavior: Platforms they use and how they engage with content.
Step 3: Identify Relevant Platforms
Every social media platform might not be good for your brand. It is important to focus on where the audience is more active, for instance:
- Instagram and TikTok: Tend to be useful for younger audiences that are more inclined visually.
- LinkedIn: Great for B2B businesses and networking over social media.
- Pinterest: Brands that are in the fashion niche, food or DIY tend to do better over Pinterest.
Trying to do maximum platforms at once can be counterproductive, so starting from 2-3 and expanding later is more beneficial.
Step 4: Create a Content Plan
A social media strategy can be useless without content; it is a key component and should be paid the most attention with regard to social media strategies. Ensure that the posts are a combination of educational, entertaining, and visually inspiring and includes:
- Educational Posts: Content, tutorials, tips, and how-to.
- Storytelling: Customer success stories or Behind the scene moments.
- Interactive Content: Polls, quizzes and Q & A to enhance engagement.
- Trending Content: Content with helloing hashtags, well known memes, or participating in challenges.
Put up a calendar containing information of posts you will schedule to increase the visibility of your business.
Step 5: Leverage Paid Advertising
The use of paid ads can help businesses who have a hard time creating an organic social media presence. Paid marketing enhances the outreach of your message to a particular audience. Advertising social media platforms like these can help:
- Facebook Ads Manager: Provides recent versions of advertisements along with target marketing.
- Instagram Ads: Helps create visually appealing promotions.
- LinkedIn Ads: Helps advertise business campaigns to individuals in corporate business.
Try small scale paid marketing before scaling as it can allow you to gain a better understanding of your target audience.
Step 6: Engage With Your Audience
Social media is not just a place to promote your content. Use it as a way to communicate with clients and build relations by:
- Responding to direct messages as well as comments.
- Respond to your audience by liking and commenting on their posts.
- People can encourage your content by tagging you in their posts.
The more you interact with people, the stronger the community becomes.
Step 7: Track Performance and Optimize
Make sure to measure the potential of your posts using Hootsuite, Google Analytics and other relative tools. Check for:
- Follower growth.
- Engagement rate (likes, comments, shares).
- Click-through rate (CTR) on links.
- Conversion rates.
Focus on using strategies that have proven to make a positive conversion.
Great Examples of a Social Media Strategy
Here are some of the best examples of how brands successfully deploy strategies across social media platforms:
1) Nike
Nike employs an inspiring narrative, collaboration with top influencers, and user-created materials targeting their clients. Their campaigns such as “Just Do It” are blended motivational and customer success testimonials which is relatably appealing.
2) Airbnb
Airbnb curates content that is related to the community by showcasing user’s photos of special places that they have stayed. They also practice social listening in order to find the latest destinations and then tailor their content to fit those locations.
3) Glossier
Glossier uses Instagram as a tool to actively grow their business by nurturing their followers into a bigger community. Posting and reposting customer pictures and encouraging discussions around newly launched products creates a sense of community.
4) Spotify
Spotify goes a step further in personalizing the experience with their Wrapped Campaign where listeners are presented with tailored information regarding their listening patterns. This campaign gets considerable attention each year and inspires sharing.
5) Wendy’s
With their engaging and comical brand voice, Wendy’s grabs attention on Twitter. They serve their audience with cheeky responses and hilarious roast replies which makes them one of the most interacted social media accounts.
Tools for Social Media Management
Appropriate social media management tools used for organizing, posting, and evaluating social media activities for your brand can save a lot of your valuable time. These tools enable organizations to become more efficient and enhance their interaction with their audience. Here are some of the very helpful tools:
1) Hootsuite
Having Hootsuite as a social media manager in your company will ensure that all social media postings, interactions and performance are monitored across all platforms. All operations are simplified and effortlessly accessible through their dashboard.
2) Buffer
With marketing automation Buffer, you are guaranteed to receive a powerful tool carefully constructed to assist you with your social media scheduling and content management. Get to enjoy sophisticated analytics of your engagement activities to determine the most effective marketing strategies.
3) Sprout Social
A one-stop platform for scheduling, analyzing and social listening. Sprout Social offers amazing reporting systems that goes as far measuring ROI and adjusting the brands Social Media strategy according to business needs.
4) Later
The perfect marketing tool for social media rich in visual content planning such as Instagram and Pinterest. Later enables amazing scheduling features like drag-and-drop calendars and link-in-bio tools to easily and quickly increase traffic from Instagram.
5) Canva
Above all else, Canva is a graphic design software that excels at making eye-catching social media visuals. Canva has templates ready for use in the Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter pages so users can create top-tier graphics without much work.
6) Agorapulse
Social media managers will enjoy Agorapulse since it is a single solution for social media management and it provides scheduling, inbox, and mentions management alongside social listening services. It is especially helpful when many accounts and team members are involved in the management.
7) SocialBee
SocialBee prioritizes content management strategies by grouping together and revamping evergreen content. It also allows users to prepare social media posts in advance and schedule them to ensure brands are active at all times.
Using these tools will optimize your online presence, allowing you to spend more time developing content that best connects with your target audience.
Conclusion
Today having a social media strategy for your brand is a must due to the heavy reliance on social media platforms for virtually any task. Your strategy shouldn’t just consider what you are posting, but how your brand can meaningfully engage with your audience.
When goals have been established, audience defined, platforms selected, and commitment has been made, your brand will strengthen its media presence and achieve the set business goals.
The greatest thing of all? The strategies that can be employed on social media are not static. Try things out, figure out what doesn’t work, and be mindful of changes that need to be made as trends do change. Whether yours is a new business or a more developed firm, having a strategy gives you the upper hand always.
