All big and small businesses have presence on social media today. While many businesses have lively presence, some others just exist. The fact is, although social media has a lot to offer in terms of online visibility, you can’t expect much from social by just being there. You need to have a crisp social media strategy if you want to increase likes on Facebook and followers on Twitter. You may argue that those who have that kind of following have huge budgets which small organizations cannot match, but that’s untrue. The underlying philosophies that these “socially successful” organizations follow can be replicated by businesses of all size.
More than 50% of marketers who’ve been using social for three years or more say it has helped them improve sales. If you are stuck on what to do next and how to get followers after creating social media accounts, then you have come at the right place. In this blog, you will see seven important tips to shape up your social media marketing strategy.
A social media strategy that targets everybody is hardly for anybody. Here, you might have to do some number crunching. You will have to find out who are the people who are active on different social media channels and accordingly provide content to them. Don’t make any assumptions; instincts are hardly of any use here. You will have to find out where the people live, which language they speak, what’s their age group and what they will like to see on social media. Once you have this information, you can create accurate content for specific channel, for specific audience, to achieve specific goals.
Each of your social media activity should be tied to a business objective. At first, define what your goals are and how will you measure your achievements; will you go for mechanical social signals such as likes, tweets, shares, pins and others which are easy to track but are difficult to evaluate in business terms? Or will you go for more meaningful metrics like conversions and leads generated? Some of the common objectives can be increasing prospects, improving search rankings, increasing your customer base, increasing sales, getting more online traffic, and increasing email subscribers.
Now picture is quite clearer- we have identified our prospects and decided our goals. The next thing is to decide the channels through which we will reach our audience. The most persuasive social media strategies are usually data driven. In case of choosing the channels, the scheme is no different. The data-driven understandings will ensure that you choose the right channels that will increase the chances of meeting your goals. For example, did you know that American women have a significant edge in using Pinterest over men? Or that Facebook might be the right choice to publish content daily as more than two-third of users use the site on daily basis? Go through these insights from the Pew research Center for more details.
Once you have decided your channels for distributing content, the next task is to come up with the right distribution material for each channel. The formula of success here is to offer assortment while being consistent. You may base your content around news items, inspirational materials, instructive materials, advertising materials, influencer material, and community events to name a few. You should also know what types of content are famous on which channel – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. Once you know what to publish, the next thing is to decide how to do it. Some common ways to distribute content are offer periodic content in the form of a series, cross-publish successful content across channels, do a re-run of popular content – these ideas will ensure that you never run out of content to publish.
The success of your social media marketing largely depends on how you implement the techniques. After getting a grip over your objectives, your target visitors, and which channels you will be using, now it’s time to develop an overarching framework to manage your social media campaigns. Develop a content calendar for each channel, keep content ready in advance for posting, make advance plan for festivals like Christmas, if you share your post across channels, optimize your post for each channel, and remember that in social media interactions happen both ways, so do take out time for commenting, retweeting, and ensure that you present a positive image of your brand to people on social channels.
One of the commonality of the social media platforms is that they are runny; you cannot create a plan and stick to it for a long time without evaluating its effectiveness. You will have to readjust your strategies to get the most out of each platform. By this time, you already have objectives in place, so create a chronology to check if your plan is doing good enough, if not then look for other ways to tweak it. By using Google Analytics reporting, you can easily determine effectiveness of social campaigns on different platforms. For example, you will be able to ascertain the success of your latest share on Facebook or video post on YouTube.
You will have to look at the social word differently, and find innovative, creative ways to replicate the success stories of others but at the same time maintain distinctiveness and uniqueness of your own brand. Many social networks publish success stories of businesses to highlight how they have used these networks to achieve their goals and succeed. For example, have a look at Facebook Business Success Stories that offers various case studies to inspire and motivate you to see how businesses similar to yours have used these networks to achieve their business objectives. Here is another list of brands that have excellent social media strategies.
Today, it will be disingenuous to say that social media is not a high priority for most of the marketing programs. Having a comprehensive plan to use social media to put your company on the path of growth will be for good reason. You will have to continuously evaluate your strategy so that it can pull in new traffic and increase your online presence, and all this will take just a fraction of your marketing budget.