There are a lot of social media networks, and they’re always introducing new features, which can be overwhelming for businesses trying to create a social media strategy.
If you don’t have a full-time team of social media experts, it can be harder to be successful. However, having a sensible and straightforward strategy that fits your resources and goals is essential for success.
At the end of this guide, you will have a social media strategy that increases traffic and helps you feel less overwhelmed when you open Instagram or Twitter.
What is a social media strategy?
A social media strategy comprises the content your business will post on social media, the responsibilities of your social media team, and the social media channels you will use to promote your business. To be effective, social media goals should be aligned with your business’ wider digital marketing strategy.
Your social media strategy is your overall plan for how you want to use social media to achieve your marketing goals. This includes your plans for what kind of content you will post, how often you will post it, and how you will interact with your audience.
Many companies use social media to connect with their customers and provide support, as well as advertise new products and features, and promote special offers.
The way a business uses social media depends on the kind of image the business wants to project, who its target customers are, and the restrictions of the various social media platforms. Taking these things into account will help ensure that your company’s message gets across to the right people in the right way.
As an example, T-Mobile’s social media team made the most of the Mother’s Day holiday to promote their T-Mobile Tuesdays app. The tweet uses humor to catch users’ attention and includes a timely promotion to appeal to Twitter users who haven’t got a gift for Mother’s Day.
Why You Need a Social Media Strategy
1. Reaching the target audience is one of the main challenges for social media marketers. 2. It can be difficult to measure ROI for social media marketing campaigns. 3. Achieving business goals is another common challenge for social media marketers.
Without a social media strategy, you won’t be able to set goals, track your performance, or know what needs to be tweaked.
Creating a strategy:
1. Helps you set goals and guardrails.
A social media strategy provides guidance for your business’s social media marketing efforts. It can help you increase brand awareness, create buzz around a promotional event, or launch a rebranding campaign. A social media strategy can keep your marketing consistent, on task, and relevant to your target audience.
2. Allows you to track goal performance.
A social media strategy is not complete unless it has performance indicators to track progress. These key performance indicators show how close the business is to its social media goals.
3. Helps you tweak your benchmarks over time.
By benchmarking your social media marketing strategy, you can compare your current social media performance to industry standards, your competitors’ performance, and your past performance. This allows you to identify areas where you need to improve.
Comparing your performance to standards lets you see which parts of your social media strategy could be better so that you can achieve your desired outcome.
A social media strategy can also help you manage expectations for your team’s involvement in social media, and ensure that everyone understands what is and is not appropriate to do on your company’s social media accounts.
How to Create a Social Media Strategy
Here are some tips for creating a social media strategy from scratch: 1. Identify your goals. What do you hope to achieve through social media? 2. Do your research. Learn about your audience and what platforms they use. 3. Create content that is valuable and engaging. 4. Promote your content through various channels. 5. Analyze your results and make adjustments as needed.
1. Define your target audience.
If you haven’t already done so, start by defining your buyer personas by their key demographics, such as age, gender, occupation, income, hobbies and interests, etc.
It is important to define your target audience when creating advertising so that it is focused on the specific needs of your ideal consumer.
For example, the tweets from Monday.com, a project management platform, emphasize the platform’s flexibility and ability to customize workflow. The tweets are aimed at business owners and project managers who may feel constrained by other project management software.
When coming up with a product, it is important to consider what kinds of people would want to buy it and what problems they are facing. It is best to focus on active prospects likely to become buyers, instead of getting hung up on the people who are not interested in the product.
2. Start with a plan
You can begin using social media for business by making an account on one of the many platforms available. Once you have an account, you can start posting content related to your business. You can also use social media to interact with potential and current customers. It is simple to commence using social media to further your business. Social media is something we all use in our daily lives, so we are familiar with the tools. To begin, you can create an account on a social media site. After you have an account, you can post content related to your business. Additionally, social media can be used to communicate with customers and clients.
There is no charge for creating a Facebook Page for your business, posting on Instagram, or having a presence on Twitter.
You should still make a plan even if you are using free social tools because it is an investment in your business.
You will not be successful in achieving your goals if you do not have a plan. Without a plan, you cannot gauge whether or not your efforts are leading to success.
When creating a social media plan, be sure to consider what business goals you want to achieve. This will help ensure that your social media efforts are focused and effective.
Here are some strategic social media tips from Hootsuite’s guide to creating a social media marketing plan:
3. Set social media goals and objectives
Smart goals are those that are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely.
Your goals should be based on things that will actually have an impact on your business, like acquiring customers or increasing your conversion rate, not just on getting more likes.
Research the competition
What are some ways that your competitors are using social media? While it’s not a good idea to copy them, you can learn from their example to reduce the amount of time it takes to learn what works.
A competitive analysis is a useful tool for understanding what strategies are working well for other businesses in your industry, and which ones are not. This type of information can help you improve your own business strategies.
Conduct a social media audit
Now is the time to re-evaluate your current social media strategy if you are already utilizing it.
This social media audit template will help you to assess your social media performance and make necessary improvements.
Get inspired
You can find inspiration for your business from the success of businesses in all industries, not just businesses similar to yours.
You can find success stories on the business section of most social networks’ websites.
By studying the strategies of your favorite brands, you can also learn how to make your own content more engaging.
Create a social media calendar
Having a social media calendar helps you ensure that you are posting the appropriate content to the correct social channels at the most opportune time. Your social media calendar should have a content strategy mapped out.
If you want your content to be successful, start with the 80-20 rule. Make sure that 80% of your content is informative, educational, or entertaining for your audience. The other 20% can be used to promote your brand or sell your products.
4. Decide which platforms are right for you
Do not assume that your audience spends their time online in one particular place.
If you want to target Gen Z, you shouldn’t just focus on Instagram and TikTok. Nearly a quarter of Facebook users are aged 18 to 24.
If you want to sell to baby boomers, you should focus on Facebook and Pinterest. These are the social networks that baby boomers use the most. Adults over the age of 65 are Facebook’s fastest growing audience.
Even brands that are established and have an audience that is not Gen Z are experimenting with TikTok marketing.
This means that TikTok is still growing in popularity and is being downloaded by a lot of new users.
Information on the demographics of major social media platforms is available on sites such as Sprout. Use this information to help you understand where your audience is spending their time online. Keep in mind that these demographics are just an overview.
To ensure you’re using social media for business effectively, it’s important to conduct some research on your target audience. This will help you understand how they spend their time online.
You can use different social media platforms to reach different audiences or meet different business goals instead of having an all-or-nothing approach.
5. Expand your audience
After you have identified your target audience, you can go back and edit your social media plan. Try to find ways to reach a larger quantity of people who are similar to your target audience.
The Great Courses Plus changed their Facebook advertising strategy when more people were looking for ways to fill their time at home.
They advertised an extended free trial offer to a broad audience in the United States and then used lookalike audiences to reach new audiences in Canada, the UK, and Australia who were similar to their best existing customers.
6. Pay attention to trends
We’re not saying you should share every meme that goes viral. (Please don’t share every meme that goes viral.)
It is beneficial to kept abreast of current trends in social media so that you are aware of what People are looking for when they go on social media platforms. This will enable you to create content that is relatable and will stand the test of time.
State Farm insurance has an ongoing Pinterest campaign that provides informative content about major life changes like buying a car or having a child. Since these moments tend to impact insurance needs, it’s an obvious fit that has helped the insurance giant connect with millennials and Gen X.
Pins about road trips became popular last spring as people started to travel more locally. State Farm created a series of Pins explaining how their company helps protect customers during uncertain times.
The top five reasons people use social media now are:
- To stay up-to-date with news and current events
- To find funny or entertaining content
- To fill up spare time
- To stay in touch with friends
- To share photos or videos with others
You should always be considering what your audience currently needs, rather than what has worked in the past. Things change over time, so something that was successful before may not have the same effect now.
Social listening is a great way to figure out what your audience wants to hear from your brand.
The social media marketing industry has experienced growth in recent years due to the inclusion of social commerce; the ability to sell products directly through social channels. Business has seen a boom as a result, with a global market value of $89.4 billion in 2020.
As of June 2020, Facebook has 18.3% of American adults making purchases through the site, with another 11.1% coming from Instagram.
Nowadays, you don’t need a website to sell your products or services. You can use social shopping tools instead.
8. Mix up your formats
Switch up the format of your social posts from time to time. For example, if you usually post GIFs, try posting a JPG. If you normally post still images, try posting a video.
Make sure to use all of the features that each social media platform offers, like Stories, Reels, or Live video.
This allows you to see which formats work best for different types of content and for different social media networks.
The Facebook algorithm uses a variety of content types to ensure that a person’s newsfeed is interesting and engaging. If you switch up your content formats, you may be able to reach a larger audience.
If you want to use images in your social posts, and don’t have a great photo library yourself, stock photo sites are a great source of free, high quality photos. Using random images from online is not okay, as it could get you into some serious trouble.
Make sure your posts are accessible to everyone by adding alt text to images and captions to videos. Also, be sure the images you share resonate with your audience.
9. Focus on quality over quantity
There are a lot of social media marketing options for small businesses, but it’s more important to create quality content on a couple of key channels than to have a presence on every single network.
Make sure your social posts are valuable to your followers. If all you do is pitch and sell, people will not want to follow you. Social marketing is about building relationships.
Be authentic and honest in your interactions with others, and create content that is original and useful. You can’t phony this stuff up, so make sure that what you’re putting out there is genuine.
You can’t do everything and there’s no point in trying. Find your audience where they’re already active online.
It’s better to focus on one or two social media platforms and master them before moving on to others. This way, you can build on what you already know and expand your social media efforts.
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