Strategy building

Too many businesses go into social media marketing on an ad hoc basis. They know they should do something about social media, but don’t really understand what they should do. Some firms just give access to the company’s social accounts to some junior staff members – merely because they are young, so they should know all about social media. However, we are well past a social strategy of post and hope. All businesses need to create a social media marketing strategy and operate the business social accounts in a thoughtful, measured way. Firms can’t ignore social media, however. According to Ambassador, 71% of consumers who have had a good social media service experience with a brand are likely to recommend it to others. Yet, 96% of the people that discuss brands online do not follow those brands’ owned profiles. Even if you embrace the wonders of influencer marketing, you still need to operate some social accounts yourself.

1. Select Relevant and Realistic Social Media Marketing Goals

One of the most significant problems faced by many businesses engaged in social media is that they have never spent the time to set relevant and realistic social media marketing goals. They know they need to be on social media, but have no idea why they are there. Of course, your social media marketing goals need to fit into your business planning as a whole. Ideally, you will have set strategic goals for how you want your business to progress. Your social media marketing goals should complement your overarching business goals.

All too often, people set woolly business goals that have little meaning if you scrutinize them. Remember, you’re not creating goals merely for the sake of it. You are building them to help you devise the most suitable social media strategy for your business. Therefore, you will want to ensure that your goals are SMART:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Relevant
• Time-bound

The SMARTer your goals, the more likely you will be able to meet them – and just as importantly, know that you are meeting them. While you want to challenge yourself, it is essential that you set attainable, realistic goals. You might love to have one million Facebook followers, but that is unlikely to be achievable within the next year for most businesses, even those that perform exceptionally well. This is where it is prudent to set some limitations. Don’t attempt to succeed on every social network. There are too many, and you spread your resources too thinly. You just need to perform well on the same social networks your target market spends their time.

Your goals will be personal to your business and complement your overarching business goals. However, typical types of social media goals you could consider (couched in a suitable SMART-style) include:

• Increase brand awareness. This means getting your name out there. To create authentic and lasting brand awareness, avoid solely publishing promotional messages. Instead, focus on content that emphasizes your personality and values first.
• Generate leads and sales. Whether online, in-store or directly through your social profiles, followers don’t make purchases by accident.  For example, are you about alerting customers about new products and promos? Are you integrating your product catalog into your social profiles? Are you running exclusive deals for followers?
• Grow your brand’s audience. Bringing new followers into the fold means finding ways to introduce your brand to folks who haven’t heard of you before. Growing your audience also means discovering conversations around your business and industry that matter the most. Digging through your social channels is nearly impossible without monitoring or listening for specific keywords, phrases or hashtags. Having a pulse on these conversations helps you expand your core audience (and reach adjacent audiences) much faster.
• Boost community engagement. Index data shows that 46% of consumers think brands that engage their audience are best in class on social, so it pays to explore new ways to grab the attention of your current followers.  This means experimenting with messaging and content. For example, does your brand promote user-generated content and hashtags? Even something as simple as asking a question can increase your engagement rate. Your customers can be your best cheerleaders, but only if you’re giving them something to do.
• Drive traffic to your site. Simple enough. If you’re laser-focused on generating leads or traffic to your website, social media can make it happen. Whether through promotional posts or social ads, keeping an eye on conversions and URL clicks can help you better determine your ROI from social media.

2. Determine Your Most Relevant Metrics

Ideally, you should look at the marketing goals you set above, and determine which metrics will provide you with the answer as to whether you are meeting that goal. For example, if you have a goal that aims to increase your brand awareness, then Post Reach is a relevant statistic. It will tell you how far your content is spreading across social channels. If your goals are more sales-based, or you want to drive people to take a particular action, then you should take notice of the number of Clicks. Tracking Clicks per campaign will give you a good indication of what drives people to buy or do what you ask of them. You will often take most interest in the engagements on your posts. This shows how people interact with your content and whether it resounds with them.

3. Learn everything you can about your audience

Create audience personas. Knowing who your audience is and what they want to see on social media is key. That way you can create content that they will like, comment on, and share. It’s also critical if you want to turn social media followers into customers for your business. When it comes to your target customer, you should know things like:

• Age
• Location
• Average income
• Typical job title or industry
• Interests

Get to know your fans, followers, and customers as real people with real wants and needs, and you will know how to target and engage them on social media.

4. Select the Right Social Media Networks for Your Audience

Some people worry about how they are going to find the time and energy to operate accounts on every social network. In most cases, you don’t need to. You simply need to find the right social networks for your business. You want to discover the social networks where your intended audience spends their time. You may have to carry out some research first to discover where your intended audience hangs out. This shouldn’t be too difficult, particularly if you know your customers. If you don’t already understand this, you could survey them, asking them for their preferred social accounts. You could start with your audience’s most preferred network and then widen to include others where a sufficiently large number operates active social accounts. You generally wouldn’t need to go further than three to five social networks, however. We are taking a reasonably broad definition of social networks here. Obviously, you include well-known ones like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter in your considerations. You could also look at video platforms like YouTube and TikTok if your target audience uses them in large numbers. In some cases, live streaming apps like Twitch might be suitable for your audience, too.

5. Get to know your competition

Odds are your competitors are already using social media, and that means you can learn from what they’re doing. Conduct a competitive analysis. A competitive analysis allows you to understand who the competition is and what they’re doing well (and not so well). You’ll get a good sense of what’s expected in your industry, which will help you set social media targets of your own. It will also help you spot opportunities. Maybe one of your competitors is dominant on Facebook, for example, but has put little effort into Twitter or Instagram. You might want to focus on the networks where your audience is underserved, rather than trying to win fans away from a dominant player.

Use social media listening. Social listening is another way to keep an eye on your competitors. Do searches of the competition’s company name, account handles, and other relevant keywords on social media. Find out what they’re sharing and what other people are saying about them. As you track, you may notice shifts in how your competitors and industry leaders are using social media. You may come across new, exciting trends. Or, you might spot a specific post or campaign that really hits the mark—or totally bombs. Use this kind of intel to inform your own social media marketing strategy.

6. Establish a Realistic Social Media Budget

Let’s be realistic. No business should merely pay lip service to its social media accounts. Social media marketing is as viable a form of marketing as any other marketing type for most companies, and you should be prepared to allocate a budget accordingly. You can’t expect social media success if you simply tag it onto the pre-existing list of duties your existing office staff performs. On the other hand, you shouldn’t spend more on your social media activities than you can realistically earn in increased sales, or at least in brand recognition and awareness if that is more where your goals lie. As with any form of marketing, you should calculate a return on investment (ROI) from your social media expenditure, bearing in mind the goals you set earlier in your strategy. As you go about setting a social media budget, you should consider how much you intend to spend on all your digital marketing across all channels. Then ask yourself how much of that budget you are prepared to devote to social media.

7. Plan the Types of Content You Intend to Share

Of course, to be successful on social media, you will need high-quality content to share. One of the biggest mistakes that businesses do is to share excessive promotional material. Remember, social networks are designed to be social – they were never intended to be a marketplace for you to sell your products. Therefore, you need to balance the content you share socially, to be a mixture of informative and entertaining items, with a small percentage of promotional material added in. You will also need to like and share other peoples’ content. This is probably the most significant reason that most influencers gain that status. They know their audience well and create the perfect content to interest their followers. As a brand, you need to do the same. If you have previously determined your goals and discovered what works (and what doesn’t) for your competition, you should have a reasonable idea of the type of content that will resonate with your target audience. There is little point creating content for other types of people who will never help you meet your goals.

Be Realistic About What You Can Produce

You need to understand any limitations you may face when creating content. For example, you might want to run a great YouTube channel, but if you don’t have the equipment, people, knowledge, and time to create high-quality videos, it is pointless going down that track. You don’t want a YouTube channel with just one or two poorly-filmed videos of talking heads. Likewise, there is little value in planning to make live video streams if you don’t have anybody who feels comfortable presenting in front of the camera in a live broadcast. You need to balance the types of content that your target audience most enjoy, with the material that you feel best equipped and most comfortable making.

Don’t Mix Your Personal Tastes with Those of Your Target Audience

The odds are that you, or the person running your business social account, will also run personal social accounts. You must distinguish between the two types of accounts. Just because you like to make a particular type of post on your own accounts, does not mean that those posts will work on the company accounts. You presumably post about things that interest you. However, when operating the business account, you need to think solely about the tastes of your target audience. You want to make posts that will interest, entertain, and educate them. You should probably write down your niche topics. This is particularly important when you curate content. For example, you should even restrict the tweets you retweet to those that relate to your niche topics.

8. Set Up Your Accounts Properly Before You Make and Promote Content

It is vital that you set your accounts up correctly. You will want a consistent visual look across all of your social channels. Use the correct colors, logos, and similar graphics on each network. Don’t waste any of your social real estate. Take the time to fill in your bios and profiles fully. Make sure that you link to relevant places, perhaps even create specific landing pages on your website for people who click through from your social accounts. It is worth taking the time to ensure that you have uploaded all the images on your bios and profiles at the best resolution for the social network. Keep in mind your target audience as you set up each account. Ask yourself whether your page will interest these people, based on what you show on your bio or profile.

9. Establish the Best Times to Post and Set Up a Content Calendar

While you could manually make all of your social posts, that is inefficient, and may not lead to the best results. Most of the social networks now use some form of algorithm to filter the results they give people. This means that if you post at a different time to when your target audience is online, they may never see your content. Ideally, you will want to use one of the social scheduling tools so you can set up and organize multiple posts at the same time.

10. Create a social media content calendar

Sharing great content is essential, of course, but it’s equally important to have a plan in place for when you’ll share content to get the maximum impact. Your social media content calendar also needs to account for the time you spend interacting with the audience (although you need to allow for some spontaneous engagement as well).

Set your posting schedule. Your social media content calendar lists the dates and times at which you will publish types of content on each channel. It’s the perfect place to plan all of your social media activities—from images, link sharing, and re-shares of user-generated content to blog posts and videos. It includes both your day-to-day posting and content for social media campaigns. Your calendar also ensures your posts are spaced out appropriately and published at the best times to post.

Determine the right content mix. Make sure your content strategy and calendar reflect the mission statement you’ve assigned to each social profile, so that everything you post is working to support your business goals.

You might decide that:

• 50% of content will drive traffic back to your website
• 25% of content will be curated from other sources
• 20% of content will support lead-generation goals (newsletter sign-ups, ebook downloads, etc.)
• 5% of content will be about your company culture

Placing these different post types in your content calendar will ensure you maintain the right mix. If you’re starting from scratch and you’re not sure what types of content to post, try the 80-20 rule:

• 80% of your posts should inform, educate, or entertain your audience
• 20% can directly promote your brand.

You could also try the social media content marketing rule of thirds:

• One-third of your content promotes your business, converts readers, and generates profit.
• One-third of your content shares ideas and stories from thought leaders in your industry or like-minded businesses.
• One-third of your content is personal interactions with your audience

Don’t post too much or too little. If you’re starting a social media strategy from scratch, you may not have figured out how often to post to each network for maximum engagement yet. Post too frequently and you risk annoying your audience. But, if you post too little, you risk looking like you’re not worth following.

11. Create Suitable Content to Share with Your Followers

There are four questions you should ask yourself when creating content:

• What is the optimal character count per social media channel?
• What is the number of hashtags for messages on each social channel?
• Should I be using emoji in my social media messages?
• What is the best content type for each channel?

Don’t forget the importance of images and videos. Visual content is more than 40 times more likely to be shared on social media than other types of content. Instagram has rapidly grown in importance over the last few years, and it has a significant visual focus. Top brands on Instagram report a per-follower engagement rate of 4.21%. That is 58 times higher than on Facebook and 120 times higher than on Twitter. Each year, video content appears to increase in popularity, too. According to YouTube, mobile video consumption grows by 100% every year. 64% of customers say they are more likely to buy a product online after watching a video about it.

Create Diverse Content

While you want your content to have a general look, particularly within individual social campaigns, you don’t want all your social content to look the same. People respond best to variety in their social feeds. Depending on the social network, they like a mix of enticing imagery, entertaining videos, and even some compelling text copy. Of course, some social networks only allow you one or two of these content types, but you can still alter the mix of posts within a medium. For example, suppose you are a cooking company. In that case, you might like to share close-up mouth-watering food images on Instagram – but don’t exclude other types of pictures and even the occasional video. When somebody goes to your Instagram profile, reads your bio, and sees your posts together, they want some variety, without everything being so different that it looks disjointed.

Customize Your Content for Each Social Network

It’s important to remember that not every social channel is identical. Ideally, you should customize your content for each network.

Twitter

Twitter comes with a self-imposed limitation – you can’t write more than 280 characters in a tweet. So your message needs to be short and to the point. You can include links in tweets and hashtags (but no more than 1 or 2). Tweets with images perform far better than those without.

Facebook

Facebook posts can be longer than tweets, but don’t make them excessively so. People can be easily turned off by a wall of text. It is always a good idea to include some personal comments, even if you are simply sharing curated content. Short videos perform well on Facebook. Add an image or video with every Facebook post, but relate them to your text. Link posts often perform well on Facebook

Instagram

Instagram is an image-based social network, so you need to share interesting, relevant photos, and short videos. You can combine these to tell a Story, which has the advantage of sitting at the top of people’s feeds, rather than being lost in regular posts.

Pinterest

Pinterest is also very image-focused. Indeed, people Pin images on themed boards. So you need to focus your Pinterest content around a pinnable picture. Pinterest can be perfect for creatively showcasing products, particularly if you have a predominantly female target audience.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a professional network, so you need to ensure that all the posts you share there are suitable for such an audience. People often read posts on LinkedIn hoping to educate themselves, particularly anything that can help further their careers.

YouTube

YouTube is, of course, renowned as the home of medium to long-form video. You set up a channel and post videos to it, preferably following an overall theme. You need something to set you apart from all the other YouTube channels. You should aim to post at least one video per week, so your audience knows they can expect new videos consistently. You should generally avoid simply uploading your existing television ads. Aim to make and upload well-made, high-quality videos. One way to avoid making videos that look too obviously like ads is to make interesting videos that incorporate your products.

TikTok

TikTok is beloved by Generation Z and, to a lesser extent, millennials. If they’re your target market, then you should be making short-form videos for the platform. Videos on TikTok can be of any length up to 60 seconds, although most are around 15 seconds. Trends are significant to TikTok’s audiences, so take note of the latest trends and try to make and share a quick video following the trend as soon as you notice it. As with YouTube, it’s vital you choose a niche for your TikTok videos that is likely to interest your target audience. With TikTok videos being short, you need to post often to keep the attention of your viewers.

12. Promote Your Social Channels

Although good content will ultimately sell your social channels, you still need to gain your initial following. People have to find your channels before they can choose to follow you. You can promote your channels in various ways, some highly visible, others more subtly. You should place buttons for all your social accounts at various places on your website – on your home page, in your footer, on your About and Communications pages, for example.  If you have an email list, you should include a reference to your social channels in any emails and newsletters you send. You can easily add buttons to your social channels in the footer of every email. Of course, you can also promote your social channels offline. Include them in your store signage and old-school advertisements. Many firms cross-promote their social channels. For example, you can make tweets promoting your YouTube channel. You might notice that most YouTube channels list the channel owner’s other social accounts on their profile page. You can even run ads on your social channels, with a highly targeted audience, to build brand recognition and increase your social followers.

13. Engage with Your Audiences

People don’t just go onto social networks to read, look at, or watch content. They go online to interact with other people and to be social. Successful businesses do not just broadcast to their social audiences. They engage with them too. This is why you should not attempt to cover every social network unless you have a very diverse target market and an army of personnel dedicated to this task. By focusing your attention on the social networks your target market frequents, you can use your resources efficiently. Some firms have found it very useful to create custom hashtags. Not only can these encourage discussions and sharing, but they also make it easier for you to search for posts that reference your business. Ideally, you should respond to all social mentions of your business and demonstrate that customer care is a priority for you. 

14. Build a Community for Your Audience

One of the best ways of engaging with your audience is to create a clear community for them. You want to be one of their “go-to” places each day. A crucial part of this is establishing a personality online. You want to ensure that your business comes across as having heart and soul, and people don’t see you as a faceless corporation. Try and make your posts interactive and involve your audience. Make a point of asking them for an opinion. You could perhaps include quizzes and questions to collect your followers’ views. Whatever you do, make sure your posts are interesting and newsworthy. Don’t simply regurgitate your advertisements. You want your followers to return to your posts regularly, so they must find them of value. One thing you need to give some thought to is who you use to run your social channels. Ideally, they should be employees who match the social demographics of your target audience. So if you’re targeting Generation Z, use your youngest employees to run the company’s Instagram and TikTok accounts. If you’re targeting home renovators, you should perhaps look for existing homeowners on your staff to run the business Facebook account. Depending on your target audience’s social platforms of choice, you could join and create relevant groups. Facebook Groups are ideal for B2C businesses; consider LinkedIn if your focus is more B2B. You could create a group on one of these platforms to inspire your audience.

15. Consider Paid Promotion to Boost Your Audiences

Most social networks allow you to buy some form of paid ads. Most will enable you to demographically target your ads, making them only visible to your preferred target audience. Paid promotions allow you to reach relevant audiences to whom you don’t currently connect. You can use advertisements to build brand recognition, promote particular posts/videos, or even to sell products.

16. Consider Working with Influencers to Widen Your Reach

We obviously understand the advantages of working with influencers and engaging in influencer marketing. If you select the right influencers, you have the chance to reach a whole new audience, who hopefully will have an interest in your business and its products. Influencers have already mastered the art of social media marketing – that is their strength. They have built a solid reputation online, and have a large number of keen and interested followers. You might consider working with influencers, having them to direct their followers to your social sites. You will, of course, have to create content that will interest them when they arrive at your pages, however. If you select influencers whose followers match your target audience, and you provide quality content to people that the influencers direct your way, you have a chance that these people will then become your social followers too.

17. Track Your Results and Adapt

Of course, no matter how much you plan your social efforts, there is no guarantee that things will work as you expected. If you don’t track your results, however, you will never know the success of your social campaigns. You began the process by setting goals and then determining your most relevant metrics. Therefore, you will want to keep a constant eye on how these metrics are progressing. Are your social campaigns having the desired effects on these metrics?