Social media is the rising star in digital marketing, it is the future of digital marketing. If your company hasn’t already set-up social media accounts, or if you aren’t using them on a regular basis, then you should be!
Why Do I Need A Social Media Strategy?
You can use social media as a place to pull qualitative research about your customers and content, you can connect with influencers, it can support your marketing and communication campaigns, it can be a customer service platform and more! All the different platforms are constantly evolving to allow more features and create better campaigns.
Social media isn’t just somewhere to be posting content, there’s so much more to it and to manage it efficiently and effectively, you need a strategy.
You need a strategy set up, so you know exactly who is doing what, when they are doing it and why they are doing it. If you don’t know things like this, mistakes can be made, that could potentially be catastrophic for a brands reputation.
Starting A Social Media Strategy
Run An Audit Across Your Channels
Before you even start creating a strategy, you should run an audit across all your social channels. This is a great starting point, as you will be able to see what has already been done, what has or hasn’t been successful or pick up on any errors.
I always recommend that your social channels are consistent, from the account names to the brand description and even the imagery used for the profile picture and cover photo. It’s also great to look over the finer details like opening times on Facebook company pages or contact details. The last thing you want is someone being unable to get in contact directly due to a mistake on your social media.
You can test potential account names on Knowem, so you can see if a certain account name is already being used across multiple channels before you start setting up or altering account names.
You can also take note of your following and other analytics prior to your new strategy, so you can revisit the analytics at a later date to see how well your strategy has gone.
Once these aspects have been amended, you can then move on to figure out what you want to achieve through social media.
Review The Industry & Competitors
The next step you want to take is to look into your industry and competitors within social media. This way you can get an idea of what other companies are doing successfully, or not. You can either manually go onto places like Twitter and search through industry hashtags, or you can sign up to software that helps collate these details together for you.
You may even be able to pick up on trends within the industry, and also things like the tone of voice that is used.
Revise Your Tone Of Voice & Audience
With social media being a conversational source of digital marketing, it’s so important to know your tone of voice and who you are going to be talking to. Is your brand fun-loving or perhaps marketing to a younger audience? Then you’re probably going to be using more relaxed language and perhaps even pop in a pun or two! If you’re a more informative and technical brand, then you will use a different tone of voice.
If you’re in need of finding your audience or just want to get a better insight on what they want to see or hear. Then head over to our ‘Do You Know Your Brand’s Audience’ post find out techniques you can try out to find out this type of information.
Set Out Your Objectives
You need to lay out your goals and objectives on the table and find ways through social media that can help you reach them. In marketing, we often use the term SMART objectives. This stands for; Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-Bound. For each of those points, have a think about a few goals for each, and then how you think social media can do this for you. Not every goal will work through social media, but others definitely will.
Create A Content Plan
Now that you’ve done your research and have your goals in mind, then it’s time to put together a content plan. Most like to do this through an excel sheet, with columns of the date, the social media channel and what is going to be posted out on it. You could do this to be a week in advance, or even months in advance, whatever suits your business best.
Distribute The Roles
The last part of your strategy should be distributing the roles out. Who’s going to be in charge of scheduling posts or managing any responses? It may be that one person in your office does this, or if you’re a larger company, then it may be split between a team of people. Just make sure everyone knows what they are doing, so there is no clashing or missed comments.
Once you’ve done all these steps, then your social media strategy is well on it’s way. It’s best to revisit your strategy every couple of months, as goals may get met and you will want to set new ones. It’s a forever moving and changing way of marketing and you’ve got to keep on it!
In need of more help with your social media strategy or management? We offer a variety of social media services here at Fifteen.