Social Media Strategy, What is it & Why You Require One ?
Building a successful social media strategy is to identifying your target audience, find out what your target audience wants, and delivering it to them. The first step is to make sure you have a specific goal in mind for your business that aligns with your target audience. From there, you can start constructing your plan. If you are looking to connect with potential customers, focus on methods that will maximize reach and engagement. But if you’re looking to reach a more specific audience, or if you’re looking to reach only the most relevant people, perhaps you should consider following your most successful competitor.
Following are the many ways to grow your social media presence. It’s important to choose the right one for your business, and that will vary depending on your goals and the products and services you offer. However to begin with use the following social media channels.
1. Create a Facebook Page as it is one of the most popular social media platforms, and it’s also one of the easiest to get started with. if you dont know how to create one you can also get it created for $5. Once you’ve created a Facebook page, you’ll be able to connect with your customers, attract new customers, and grow your business.
Use Facebook Ads to achieve your social media goals faster, Facebook Ads allow you to target specific audiences, so they can be highly effective for growing your business. For example, you can advertise to people in a certain area, or people who are interested in a certain kind of business. Facebook ads are a great way to connect with consumers. Facebook on an average has 2.7 billion monthly active users and offers a platform that lets you target people based on their age, gender, interests, relationship status, location, and more and by doing this you can find your followers.
2. Twitter Ads allow you to target specific audiences, so they can be highly effective for growing your business. For example, you can advertise to people in a certain area, or people who are interested in a certain kind of business. Twitter on an average has 353 million monthly active users and offers a platform that lets you target people based on their age, gender, interests, relationship status, location, and more and by doing this you can find more and more followers.
3. LinkedIn ads are an effective way to increase your brand awareness and are a great way to connect with people. Choose from a range of demographic and interest criteria, and target people based on their job title, company, industry, and more. LinkedIn ads are great for targeting people who are interested in your business or to target B2B companies. LinkedIn has more than 310 million users.
4. YouTube is a great platform for video marketing. You can upload your own video content or use a video ad company to create and upload your ad. YouTube on an average has two billion monthly active users, so it is a great way to reach a wide audience. Start a YouTube Channel as YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world. It is effective platform for content marketing and also for SEO. Create a YouTube Channel and start uploading videos and further use Google Adwords for advertising on youtube to increase your followers and web traffic.
5. Instagram is another great platform to use for video marketing & images. Instagram on an average has more than a billion monthly active users, and is a great way to connect with your target audience, you can use Instagram to share videos on your IGTV account. You can also share short videos on Instagram reels that are fun and engaging. Use images and videos with correct captions & hashtags to get organic views & traffic. Instagram also has Instagram stories with a span of 24 hours. Instagram helps your business in finding a target market, especially it helps e-commerce & D2C business to get audience that have the affinity towards the product that your company is offering. Instagram also helps in finding different product categories & niche. Through Instagram advertising, you can reach your target market easily.
6. Podcasts & Social Forums are a great way to create a unique brand experience. They are a perfect way to build your brand by providing value to your audience.
Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcast and Soundcloud are some of the top & famous podcast platforms, where you can create your own podcasts.
Social forums like Reddit & Quora are where people spend time to find out solutions to their problems and experts try to solve them.
Whatever social media platform you use, know it well in terms of
- How the algorithm of that platform works,
- How many post in a day are required to optimize the social media strategy on that platform,
- Which type of post or content will fit for what objective
- Find out what topics your target audience are searching for, offer value in your content by solving their problem, Use right CTA, keywords & hashtags, Be consistent & creative are few strategies that help you in growing your followers and achieving your business goals.
Is it important to have a plan, before you start with social media ?
If you are looking for fast results, you will need to have a plan. Many people who are looking for traffic for their website or blog are looking for fast results. However, if you don’t have a plan, you will be wasting your time and money. You need to know what you want before you spend your money and time on the traffic you are getting.
What all things are to be planned while creating a social media strategy ?
When creating a social media strategy, these are the following things that you will have to plan.
Your target audience
- Your goals like followers, traffic, lead generation, sales, etc.
- Your budget for each social media platform
- Your time & your target audience time when they are most active on social media.
- Your team that will generate ideas and will engage, manage & monitor your social media presence.
- Your content that is always new, valuable & up to the point and is required consistently to keep your audience engaged throughout the year
- Your social media platforms that fits into your overall strategy
- Tools required to achieve this goals and save time & efforts through automation
The best way to create a successful social media strategy is to start with the big picture and break it down into smaller parts. To do this, you need to ask yourself:
What are your goals? What do you want people to do when they see your message? How will you know when you’ve accomplished that goal? Who will be involved in communicating your message and what are their roles? What tools will you use for executing the strategy?
What are strategic components of a successful content strategy ?
Marketing Goals: What are the marketing goals of this strategy?
List down the topics that are required to achieve these goals
Introduction: Briefly introduce the topic in captions and include a link to the full article on your post along with relevant hashtags
Define Success before the campaign : Outline what success looks like for this strategy and prepare for it
Types of Content: What types of content should be used for this strategy?
Working with social media experts: Figure out, how can you work with bloggers or follow social media experts to get the results that you are expecting ?
How to choose the right social media marketing tools?
Go with the process, It is difficult to get a tool that performs everything in social media management, hence it is important for one to know the steps involved in social media strategy & management to get the right tool for each stage. there are tools that perform multiple task but are not capable of doing every thing at one go and hence social media management is a time consuming process that requires lot of efforts as mentioned below
Content research for Social media is all about finding what is that your target audience is looking for on social media. And It’s not always easy to figure out what content needs to be there on your social media platforms that will help in achieving the desired goal and hence there are tools that will help you in doing this before creating a content that your audience are not searching for.
It is also about finding competitions & their best practices, industry benchmarks, and other data that might be of a help to your business and audience.
Following are some free & paid content research tools that help in growing your followers and web traffic
- Google Keyword Planner is a free tool Create an ad words account and look for keywords with high search volumes
- Google trends is a free tool that finds keywords related to your business location & country
- Buzzsumo is a paid tool but very effective, when comes to research for content creation for social media platforms
- Reddit is a free tool, you can find the related sub-reddits for your topics, and you can also create a subreddit for your business that help in SEO as well.
- Quora is a social networking site that is best known for its question-and-answer format where people with expertise, answer questions that have been asked by other users.
The most effective social media management tool will have all the below functonalities
Content Curation, Once you know what topics, queries or problems your audience is looking for you start organizing the data required to create a content that adds value to your target audience
Content Creation is a process of creating a content that matches the needs of the audience and is strategically aligned with the business goals, creating a content that attracts your target audience and getting them to consume your content is the goal of content creation
Content scheduling & distribution is the act of publishing a piece of content at the right time and in the right place to ensure that it reaches your target audience
Social Media Analytics is the act of tracking which social media platforms and social media campaigns are making the most impact on your business and which social media platforms and social media campaigns are not making the most impact on your business. Social media analytics helps in determining what types of content are most effective on different platforms as well as the best times to post content that will receive the most engagement as the audience are active at that time.
Social Listening is is the act of listening to what your audience are saying about your business on social media platforms and responding to it in a timely manner. It gives you lot of valuable customer insights to improve upon your value offering across the value chain.
Social Ad Management & Social Selling is a new marketing strategy introduced on platforms like facebook, instagram & pinterest that uses social media for sales. Sales teams can use social media to build relationships with prospects, convert leads into sales, and close more sales.
Few best social media marketing tools that does research, curation, scheduling, analytics & listening ? Hence may tackle most of your social media task and also automate scheduling as per your social media calendar.
- HootSuite currently is offering a free 90 days trial to create your social media strategy
- SocialSprout is offering a free 30 day trial
- Buzzsumo is also offering a free 30 day trial
Conclusion:
It is important to have a strategy before you start with social media, and there are many strategic components to include in your strategy.
Successful social media strategy means researching your audience & competition, finding out what topics your target audience are searching for, offering value in your content by solving their problems, Use right CTA, keywords & hashtags, Being consistent & creative in your social media strategy will help in growing your followers & to meet your business goals. You can use these strategic components to get started by making a timeline, identifying goals, creating content, scheduling your posts on different channels, engaging with your audience and measuring progress to further optimize what works and analyze before shunning what does not works well.
Successful social media strategy starts with giving some thought to what your goals are and how you want to measure success before you get started. Use these strategic components to get started, identify your goals, make a timeline, create content, schedule & distribute it & measure progress. If you need any assistance in creating successful social media campaigns, you can contact us.