Social Media Strategy
Complete guide to develop a great social media strategy. Social media have become essential for businesses and brands today, and they are the favorite way to engage audience and new customers, and to share content and knowledge.
According to the latest salesforce report, last year, 31% of marketers believed social media could drive a reasonable ROI. This year 77% of them are completely sure social media drives an important part of companies’ ROI and revenue.
No need to point out how important are social media these days not only for driving ROI but for starting up businesses, growing existing ones and positioning brands. What we need to point out is how important is for a company to create a social media strategy that syncs with the other company’s strategies in order to achieve general goals.
A social media strategy is a plan to incorporate social media into your business, thus assuring the business goals are achieved. These goals usually are: Increasing customer satisfaction, generating more sales leads and driving web traffic and higher revenue.
A social media strategy needs to be based on 3 components:
1. Social media audit:
Gives you a clear picture of your social media efforts and shows you
What’s working, what’s not, and allows you to adjust course. Auditing your social profiles allows you to understand how each profile works and what network works for what type of audience. It’s not a good practice to have a profile just to have one. Engagement is based on how good is your profile and the content on it. During social media audit you need to:
- Understand your customers. Knowing your audience’s age, gender, buying habits and interests helps you provide them with the right product and service. Send surveys if you don’t have this info to gather data. Decide which social media works best for each type of audience
- Generate Competitive analysis: Understand how does your competition use social media and what works for them.
- Know the value of your company: What value is your company adding to your customers through social media now Vs the value you want to be adding
2. Objectives:
Objectives are what a company needs to accomplish. You need to set objectives, KPI’s and Key Supporting messages, and these need to be clear for each department in the company.
Objectives must be:
- Specific: Focus on the precise area of improvement
- Measurable: Make sure your objectives are measurable. Increasing 50% traffic in 3 months is measurable. Be more engaging on Social Media is not.
- Attainable: Be sure your resources allow you to achieve goals
- Realistic: Be sure your resources allow you to achieve goals
- Time-bound: Put a time frame on your goal to measure success and benchmark progress
KPI’s also allow you to measure objectives and can be seen as Number of followers, sign ups, number of unique visitors, etc.
Key messages are important to point out what you want the public to know about your business
Sync with business development and marketing department to make sure your objectives are holistic and reflective of larger business goals. Review Objectives, targets and KPI’s.
3. Online brand persona and voice
This means a unique way to communicate your company messages through all your company’s areas and to your audience. Make sure to maintain consistency in communication. Define a brand voice/identity eg; Formal or casual, fun or serious. List adjectives you want customers to know your brand for. Describe attributes to position your brand.
Once these three components are addressed you can start considering a Social media strategy based on these components:
- Strategy component: A strategy can be set by purchasing twitter ads, publish more quality posts, or connect with influencers.
- Team component: Define roles. Who is responsible for what. Keep always the brand voice. Employee advocacy is important under this component.
- Social media policy: Make expectations clear for everyone
Before setting a social media strategy I strongly recommend to chose one or more of the social media strategies available:
- PAID: Social ads, promoted tweets, boosted facebook posts
- OWNED: Branded properties such as your website, blogs, social channels. Employee advocacy.
- EARNED: Brand exposure: word of mouth, positive conversations, endorsements from influencers, media coverage
Here I also outline some tactics to incorporate in your social media strategy: Use your social network profiles such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn to identify and find new connections. Answer questions about your brand right away; offer discounts, bargains and promotions, and partner with influencers.
Identify deadlines to drive your strategy. Be aware of weekends and holidays and make sure you have the resources to achieve targets on time. Defining reporting intervals is good to measure objectives achievement, weekly, monthly, quarterly, etc. Be also aware of your company’s events and timing, these need social media amplification.
And last but not least, don’t forget the CONTENT. Sharing high quality, relevant content develops a close relationship with your audience, establish authority in your industry niche and contributes to overarching business objectives.
The Key elements on Content strategy are:
- Target audience
- Goals
- Brand voice
- Distribution channel
- Tactics
Always consider Who will create the content, which channels you’ll use to distribute it, and how often you will do it.
I am sure that following these steps you will manage to set a proper social media strategy which will allow your company to generate more revenue and see better ROI from marketing and commercial strategies.
I strongly recommend you to sign in for these free social media courses