Social media is no longer just another way for us to pass the time, as it’s become a way of life. Nowadays, businesses both large and small need to join in on the action if they wish to stay relevant and successful in today’s ever-expanding cyberspace. Yet, social media strategies have changed quite drastically from the old glory days of MySpace, and require a lot more effort on your part to be effective.
Gone are the days when you could simply register an account and expect users to flock to your very doorstep, seeing how today active engagement, interaction, and innovation is a must. As such, this guide will look to explain all of the details necessary for you to create an effective social media strategy for your business.
Choosing the Right Platforms
Not all social media platforms are created equal. Each channel has its own unwritten rules and ways of engagement which appeal to certain demographics. Depending on your target audience and the type of content you plan on posting, you want to choose platforms that will give you the biggest reach.
For example, Facebook beats the other platforms in sheer amount of users, as it’s the most generic and well-rounded of the lot. It’s excellent for building a strong relationship with your followers and increasing their overall brand loyalty.
Twitter is somewhat on the decline these days, but it’s still a useful platform for doing announcements via short Tweets.
Instagram excels at visual content and its demographics are quite similar to Twitter, with users mostly being college educated and between the ages of 18-29. Naturally, LinkedIn has the largest number of highly educated users with almost 50% of them earning $75,000 or more, meaning it’s more focused on B2B and business development at large.
Goal-Oriented Approach
Once you’ve decided which platform suits your business’s profile the most, it’s time to create a general strategy on what you want to achieve with your social media campaigns. Without a specific goal in mind, you’ll be all over the place, wasting precious time on things which are irrelevant for your strategy and thus lose money which could’ve been better used elsewhere. Hence, you want to focus on concrete goals such as: expanding your overall follower count, increasing your loyal fanbase, improving your conversion rates, and so on. Decide what’s best for your particular business and start funneling resources.
Boost Brand Awareness
Simply put, brand awareness is the way your brand is perceived by others, most notably by your clients and followers. Establishing your brand is an ongoing process, and the most important thing here is your image. Your company’s reputation, values and ideals will determine what kind of customers your business is going to attract. Because of this, your logo should be a reflection of these ideals, to properly distinguish yourself from the rest of the competition and stay recognizable to your fans and followers. In order to achieve all of this, you should look for a professional graphic design studio that has extensive experience with logo creation. Remember, this tiny pic will be the window into your business, and as such, you need to make sure it’s a perfect fit, otherwise it’ll shatter the whole image you’ve worked so hard to create.
Identify KPI’s
Now it’s time to measure the general success of your strategy by identifying your key performance indicators, or KPI for short. With these in hand, you’ll get quantifiable metrics that will help you determine if your campaign goals are being reached and how effective your social media efforts have been thus far. Some of the metrics used include: total revenue, conversion rates, number of new customers, traffic generation, and so on. As a result of this insight, you’ll be able to create data-driven strategies by pin-pointing the exact things that have worked so well for you during your campaign, and the things which need replacing.
Create 10x Content
In order for your posts to attract new followers and entertain existing ones, you need to create content that is ten times better than what anyone else is doing on a specific topic. At first glance, this might seem like an impossible task to achieve, but once you deconstruct the basic principles behind it, it’s not that difficult (in theory).
In essence, your content needs to be highly educational, engaging, and entertaining if you wish to catch anyone’s attention. These three E’s will ensure that you have an emotional response from your viewers, solve a solution to their problem, and evoke a sense of joy or excitement from them as well. Moreover, the most desired medium for this content is video, with visuals in the form of infographics taking second place.
Social Media Tools
Finally, you want to have some useful tools at your disposal to help you on your journey to success. For example, use HootSuite to manage all of your social media profiles in a single dashboard, so you don’t get lost in all of that chaos. Next, Tweetdeck is excellent for scheduling your posts to ensure you remain consistent and on your followers’ radar at all times. In addition, SocialDrift is outstanding for your Instagram account as it drives followers to your profile through clever use of algorithms.
Have a concrete plan with specific goals in mind and that’s already half the job done.
About the Author
Raul Harman is the editor-in-chief at Technivorz blog. He has a lot to say about innovation in all aspects of digital technology and online marketing. Connect with him on Twitter.
