Planning your social strategy
It’s extremely important for any business to have a clear goal in mind when looking at a social media strategy for your business – both in B2B & B2C. In this article, we will outline what to consider when planning your social strategy.
Why planning your social strategy is key to success
If you create great content and post it at the best times your audience will see it, but how do you determine when that is? A solid understanding of your audience’s behaviour needs to inform when and how you publish. Knowing your audience and how they behave is key to planning your social strategy.
To plan your social media strategy effectively, you need to determine what your specific goals are. Then set about targeting those behaviours.
Beyond a basic definition of your audience’s behaviour, however, it’s critical that you develop a clear idea of what specific metrics you should track to determine your performance. This way you can glean valuable insights that will inform decisions and generate positive results.
Once you’ve picked your metrics, you need to determine what time periods you will measure them. You can either look at the performance of your content over one week or months previous.
Technology that talks
Online reputation management, social media management, and branding are the newest elements of the marketing and public relations strategy. Whether we like it or not, we live in a public sphere. So once you set up your website, make sure that you emphasize your social media handles on your website and email newsletters.
But simply having a presence on social media isn’t enough. You need to have a strategy so planning your social strategy is paramount if you want to succeed in growing your business through social media platforms.
While it’s important to not be overly promotional on social media, it’s important to be upfront about what your business does and what your goals are. Because at the end of the day, it’s business that’s being conducted. Regularly post updates to your accounts and interact with your followers.
Make the visits worth it for them and lead with specific call-to-actions!
Listen to what the platform is telling you
Social growth is a challenge. It feels like it doesn’t get easier with time. Maybe that sounds incredibly discouraging. But let’s go with that attitude for a minute…
Social growth is more of a challenge. That’s it! Okay, but how do you get over that challenge?
Social analytics is the answer you’re looking for. Regardless of whether you started your business yesterday, you’ve spent more time in marketing than you have spent actually developing the product, or you’re looking at marketing as one of the bottlenecks in your sales growth, analytics can get your engine revving.
This is where it all starts and is vital in future planning your social strategy!
Identify high-intent keywords
Here’s the truth about content marketing: it’s a lot of work, and it takes a long time before you see the results. So if you’re serious about content marketing for social, you can’t just throw up some social posts and connect them with the perfect audience. You have to schedule your content and plan it in advance. You have to craft that content with intent.
And it’s worth doing, because social media moves fast, and if you’re not staying ahead of trends, you could end up being just one of the many voices in the ocean.
Even if you’re just using Twitter to promote your blog, you need to make sure you include perfectly optimised keywords in your tweets – although each platform has its own techniques for growth, that’s a different article completely.
Choose the right platform
Showcasing your products, building a fan base, and building your brand value online— social media can open a wide range of opportunities for businesses to reach and engage customers.
Businesses maintain a social media presence by creating and sharing valuable and consistent content to inform and acquire their audiences while tracking key metrics using various free and paid metrics and analytics tools.
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google Plus, Instagram, and Snapchat are the go-to social media platforms for many small businesses. Whereas LinkedIn is the mammoth for networking and B2B.
When it comes to social, the right platform plays a big role in the social media strategy. The right social platform is the perfect place to build a community and engage with fans.
If it’s not the right platform for you, you’re wasting valuable time and resources and your business is at a disadvantage.
Align customer service early
Whether you’re a travel company or a business in the mortgage industry, the power of social media cannot be underestimated. But then, of course, the question becomes how to capitalize on it. That’s where “social strategy” comes into play.
Despite its nearly ubiquitous popularity, social strategy is somewhat misunderstood, especially by those who have not lived it (or dare I say, consulted on it?).
At its root, social strategy is a brand’s way of managing all of its conversations at scale, to build business awareness and respect. We know companies that are not actively monitoring their conversations are missing big opportunities, but these are often the same companies also struggling to get customer service right across the social web.
So how do companies handle customer service via social media? They put in time and effort to make sure they get it right – from drafting policies to cover channels of communication, and the proper protocols for engaging with consumers to tools and processes for their customer service managers, companies do everything they can to make it easy and comfortable for customers to get in touch and interact with them.
Check out the options available by clicking HERE for help planning your social strategy or book a strategy call below.