Does Your Business Have A DYNAMIC Social Media Strategy?
Every business, regardless of their size, must have a strategy for social media marketing. To make your job easier, we have developed a DYNAMIC method to define social media strategy. This method will allow you to save a lot of time and headache, regardless of whether you’re a two-person startup or a social media agency.
If you are a very small business, you have it good. You tweet or post a photo on Facebook, fool around on Snapchat and call it a day. If you are a very large business, you too have it good. You allocate a chunk of your marketing budget for social media and leave the expert SMMs to do their job.
But if you are a growing mid-sized business with the ambition of making it big, you are in trouble. You know how important social media is, you are trying your best to tweet / post / update, but you are too busy to do it regularly.
Every business, regardless of their size, must have a strategy for social media marketing. To make your job easier, we have developed a DYNAMIC method to define social media strategy. This method will allow you to save a lot of time and headache, regardless of whether you’re a two-person startup or a social media agency like ours.
Let’s first see the tl:dr version of what DYNAMIC stands for:
- Demographics aka your target audience
- Yardstick to measure goals
- Number of posts / day that you must aim for
- Analytics to see if you are going on the right track
- Medium or platform that’s appropriate for your business
- Integration with social media tools
- Calendar to acquire precision
Demographics
Social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc. provide interesting insights on our target audience. From age, location through to their interests and habits, you can narrow down your audience through more than 282,000 categories on Facebook. Even Twitter provides keen understanding of audience. Why am I telling you this?
Because a lot of businesses are posting things they like, or they want to say, not what their audience like to hear or read. Despite social media experts telling this repeatedly there is a poor understanding of demographics.
Case in point – real estate company shares random videos and posts:
Yardstick
If you want to know if your time and efforts are well spent, set a performance measure. If you have the right yardstick, you would know where you are standing. There are many ways you can set a yardstick for social media from the number of posts or tweets through to number of likes, shares and retweets.
For instance, if you plan to boost audience engagement by x percentage within 6 months, but are still far away from the goal, you might have to think of alternate solutions like social media advertising. Set realistic and measurable goals that can be tracked.
Number of Posts
The average for posts and tweets on social media changes from industry to industry. Find out the average number of posts / tweets in a day that your competitors and other businesses within the industry do and then follow the same routine.
One of the most common questions on social media is – how often should I post on social media. If Social Times is to be believed, 10 would be a good number as about 42 percent international brands post 10 tweets per day on average. As for Facebook, only two posts would do but make sure they are image-based posts.
Analytics
Always keep one eye on social media analytics. Almost all social platforms provide great analytics. Facebook Page insights not only allow you to see which posts are doing well but also tell you when is the right time to post so that your post reaches maximum number of people.
Snapchat doesn’t offer conventional analytics platform like its mature cousins but its total unique views, completion rate, screenshots and total story completions tell quite a tale. If your audience is mostly on Snapchat, we recommend using a tool like Snaplytics to get in-depth analytics from Snapchat but be aware that it is a pricey affair.
Medium
The list of social media channels is long and updated every few months. However, the top 5 mediums include Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn. If you are from one of these industries, even Pinterest is quite an important medium. However, if you are a mid-sized business, it would be difficult to be active on all of them.
Also some mediums (Twitter and Snapchat) can be more demanding than others. If they are bringing enough value in return, you can expend efforts on them, if not you are better off choosing low-maintenance, high-reward mediums that are suitable for your industry.
Integration
Integrate social media on your website and blog and half of your job is done! Websites like Buzzfeed depend on social media to make their posts a hit. However, social media integration goes much beyond social share buttons. For instance, ahead of the movie release of The Peanuts, Twentieth Century Fox created a website that allows users to ‘peanutize’ themselves and share their new peanutized versions.
Here’s mine:
The bottom line is – integrate social media in your every campaign, move, strategy or content piece. Always think of the share-ability before you move forward with an idea. If your content is catchy, newsy or informative, it will be shared. So make sure your content as well as social media strategy align here.
Calendar
I know what you are thinking. You don’t have time to breathe let alone plan ahead for a week, month or quarter. But trust me, spend one Saturday afternoon on creating a monthly content calendar and you will feel a lot of weight lifted off your shoulders. If you still have time on hand after writing down your posts, schedule your posts using a social media scheduler. This will be the best move for your social media strategy.
Over to You
Social media has provided a means to small and medium businesses to reach and engage with customers without having a huge advertising or marketing budget. Our DYNAMIC strategy covers all aspects of social media. Understanding your audience helps you create relevant and interesting content. Yardsticks helps determine success in pursuing long term and short term goals. Easy analytics and social media management tools make it easier to handle all the incoming and outgoing data and lastly, but most importantly, a calendar helps you put your feet up and relax while you earn fans and followers!
Original Article