Social media, as we
know, is one of the key growth tools for many businesses in 2022. We have so
many platforms to utilize, from Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest,
TikTok, and more. Keeping up with all your business’s social media accounts can
be a daunting task, specifically, without a developed social media strategy.
We like to describe your social media strategy as a map; a map
that will provide you with all directions to reach the end goal of building
brand affinity. Without the use of a strategy, you probably find yourself
aimlessly posting and trying to desperately come up with new content ideas to
stay relevant to your followers, without seeing any results or growth in your
accounts.
Unfortunately, many brands tend to overlook and underestimate
the strategy that goes into creating a successful social media platform and
hope to someday go inexplicably viral, which is an unrealistic goal. The best
way to expect and notice growth and success within your social media accounts
is to develop a strategy.
we believe that every business needs an
effective social media strategy in place, to plan goals, and key performance
indicators (KPIs), understand your target audience, find your strengths and
weaknesses, track growth, and much more. In this guide, we go over the five
reasons why it’s time for your brand to finally invest in a strong,
professional social media strategy to drive business growth.
Organization is one of the keys to success in our eyes as
marketers; this is one of the reasons we love a well-planned strategy. With no
declared strategy, you’re essentially creating content and coming up with ideas
as you go, on the spot. There may be a vague direction you’re aiming for but no
actual strategy as to how you will get there.
With a social media strategy in place, you’ll get the direction
you need from understanding your target audience, to your brand voice, to the
type of content you want to create, how you are creating it, where you are
posting it, and how to schedule it. Depending on the type of content, we like
to use scheduling tools including Hootsuite, Later and Sprout Social, which are
the three tools that we recommend to clients.
With your content planned out ahead of time, you’ll never need
to worry about coming up with last-minute content ideas to post (unless there
is a hot TikTok trend that you need to get on asap, of course)!
Let’s discuss why it’s important to be prepared for the
unexpected. Say you have someone on your team in charge of social media, but
they have unexpectedly fallen ill and are incapable of working, leaving you to
have to pick up their work.
While creating your strategy, you’ll need to identify what your
business’s goals are for social media. As an experienced agency in this space,
our recommendation is to set SMART Social Media Goals. What makes a smart goal?
Let’s break it down.
Specific – the more specific you are with writing down a goal,
the easier it will be to see what you’re attempting to achieve clearly.
Some common social
media goals include:
·
Increasing brand awareness
·
Managing brand reputation
·
Increasing traffic to your website
·
Improving community engagement
·
Boosting conversions or sales
·
Lead generation
·
Delivering customer service
·
Gaining market insights with social listening
Tracking performance and seeing how your social media accounts
are growing is key to success. We believe that performance tracking is of the
utmost importance in the digital world. With your goals in place, you’ll be
able to better track the performance of your social media and truly understand
if your strategy is working to achieve them.
Tracking also helps you find the missing pieces; perhaps you are
growing, but you aren’t quite reaching your exact goal. With tracking properly,
you can take a step back, observe, and find a new tactic to reach that goal.
At the end of the day, with any social media channel you have as
a business, it’s very important to provide value to your followers. This is
where the content creation strategy comes into play, as a part of your social
media strategy. You must understand what it is that your audience is looking
for, and how you can give it to them by providing them with value.
For example, some types of valuable content can include:
·
Sharing motivational content
·
Discussing what is trending in your industry
·
Sharing tips and tricks
·
Educating users on industry trends
·
Busting myths within your niche
·
Sharing content that is relatable to your target audience (including
entertainment)
As we are now living in a completely modernized digital world,
there are a variety of digital marketing resources available for businesses to
use as marketing tools, such as social media platforms available, when used
effectively.
When building your social media strategy, before you can know
which platform will best benefit your business, it’s important to first analyze
your demographics. Therefore, you want to figure out the most prominent social
media platforms that your target audience is most active on and for what
purpose.
A social handle is another term for a creative and unique
username that you must have for each social media account that represents your business.
When figuring out your social handle is to ensure that your handle is
consistent across all your social media platforms for your business;
furthermore, the handles should either be the same or like each other so your
audience can easily find you when searching for your brand or business on
different social platforms.
When building a strong social media strategy for a business, it
can get very overwhelming, very fast, hence it’s important to set realistic
social media goals and regulations that will help improve brand awareness and
social media reputation.
When building a strong social media strategy, setting realistic
goals and regulations directs businesses to meet specific expectations at a
certain time. Some examples of realistic goals that you should include in your
social media strategy may be managing your workload, creating, and posting
creative, gathering unique user-generated content, researching SEO marketing,
and more.
A strong social media strategy includes spending enough time
designing the tone and style of each social media platform you have set up for
your business. During this step, we remind our clients that the tone and style
they choose for their social platforms is what will help their audience and
potential customer differentiate and distinguish their brand from others.
Embrace your creativity! This is your opportunity to be creative
and have fun when gathering content and creating your content strategy for
social media platforms.
Social media is now commonly used by many brands. Behind every
strong social media strategy is a detailed monthly content calendar. Utilizing
a content calendar has been very effective in helping many businesses stay on
top of the activity happening within their social media channels.
Finally, you can take a step back! At our digital agency, we
explain to all our clients how important it is to review your monthly
analytical reports to examine how all your social media platforms are
performing. An analytical report allows you to look at your overall performance
by tracking the number of viewers, engagement, and sales your social channels
are receiving.
After reading the benefits and detailed steps to creating a
strong social media strategy for your business, we truly hope that you will
begin this new chapter for your business by sitting down together with your
team to create your own!
If you’re struggling to discover the strategy that will best
help you achieve your goals, the oneisok social media marketing team is here to
help you get started. Contact us for a complimentary consultation!
December 20, 2022 - BY Admin