How to Create a Social Media Strategy

A social media presence is essential to any business. In order to make the most out of your time and energy spent on your organization’s social media channels, you should develop a strategy. Here are the five parts of a social media strategy and how to apply them.

Define your goals

What do you want to get out of your social media marketing efforts? Maybe you want to increase sales or increase traffic to your website. You decide exactly what the goal is to set the framework for the rest of the strategy. Feel free to set multiple goals. Remember, your goals should always be specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely. See an example of a goal below.

By March 1, 2019, we want to increase unique visits to our site directly from our Facebook page by 10 percent.

Determine your target audience

Who are you trying to reach? Before you can create content, you need to determine exactly who you are trying to reach and why. You’ll want to compile simple information like the age, location, gender, employment status, income level, etc. You will also want to list out more specific features like their hobbies, where they spend time and how they behave on social media platforms. Building out this target audience persona will help you determine what kind of content to share and where to share it to make the most of your marketing efforts.

Select and build out the best channels

Based on your goals, target audience and business overall, determine what social media channels you will use. Some of the most popular channels are Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest. Once you’ve landed on the channels, you can build out your channels. Make sure you have your profile filled out to the best of your ability – include a bio, your location, hours, etc. Also, make sure you have a profile picture and cover photo when applicable. We recommend using your logo for the profile picture and using the same photo across all channels.

Create and share content

Ah, the step you’ve been waiting for – publishing the posts. In this ongoing step, you will take on the biggest task of creating ongoing content. We recommend starting with a content calendar of topics and building it out at least two weeks in advance. That means, you will have an overview of what will be posted each day. It’s most helpful to build a weekly excel spreadsheet tracking the content and channels.

Once you’ve landed on topics, you can design/gather images and write the content. Always keep in mind, compelling social media posts generally: contain multimedia content (image, video, link, etc.), valuable copy and a call-to-action (what you want people to do after seeing the post).

When you have all your ducks in a row, you can begin to post. To make the most of your time, it is best to schedule posts a couple weeks in advance. That way, you can sit back and relax while the systems do the work. You’ll free up time to monitor the posts and engage with your audience. Some scheduling tools on the market are Agorapulse, Hootsuite and Tweetdeck.

Evaluate your results and modify your strategy

Often, marketers get lost in steps one through four and forget the final step, evaluation. Every month, we like to take an in-depth look at the analytics from our social channels and determine how it relates to our overall goals. You can look at yours any time to see how your efforts are going. Most social media websites have analytics built directly into the site for business accounts.

After gathering the data, you can determine how to modify your strategy. If you are meeting your goals, carry on with your strategy. If you are not where you want to be, look at what content did well and what content was not so great. Replicate your success and determine ways to get around hurdles. Repeating this step month after month will help you perfect your strategy.

 

Building a strategy is the best way to create success within your social media efforts. Follow these steps to increase your productivity when using social media for your business.

Do you need help with any of these steps? We have answers for you. Send us an email to [email protected] to see how we can help build an effective social media strategy.