How to develop a social media strategy step-by-step.
Step 1: it’s all about setting goals.
What do you want to get from your social media strategy?
Do you want to get more branding? Do you want to generate some sales? Do you want some leads? Do you want some clicks to your website?
so that way people click on your ads.
You know, for me, I want to become a thought leader
in the digital marketing space. I want people to become aware of my website.
I want to increase the traffic to my website and I want to improve my community engagement.
You see, these are all examples of stuff that are the goals that I set, and I want to also deliver amazing content through my social channels that help other people out, In other words, you want to figure out what your goals are, and set them because depending on your goals you’re going to have to decide if you want to drive more leads, more conversions, more brand awareness, direct sales, right?
You’ll be able to figure that out once you know your goals
and that’ll help you attain them.
- Now, here’s a key thing when your goal-setting:
you want to be smart: here’s what I mean, you need to be specific, - your goals need to be measurable
- they need to be obtainable : don’t set up some pie-in-the-sky goals, like I want 1,000,000 followers in a day.
They need to be relevant. If 100,000 followers doesn’t move the needle for your business then it doesn’t really matter.
And they need to be time-bound. - In other words, they need to be specific
to a certain timeframe whether it’s a week, a month, a year,
that’s how you create smart goals. In other words, you want goals that you can clearly measure whether you’re on track or not, whether those goals are going to help you hit specific business goals or not.
So then you can adjust over time and that’s why you want to use smart goals.
The second step for an efficient social media strategy :
Is for you to select the social media channels that can help you achieve those goals.
Let me give you example. If I want to use social media to drive more convergence in sales there are platforms that be more suitable for that goal. Facebook for example, is still helpful when it comes to driving conversions.
The same isn’t always true with Instagram, where you can only share links through stories or your bio and they don’t really give you a ton of clicks. On the other hand, if you want to become a thought leader in my industry like digital marketing, LinkedIn and YouTube is extremely helpful.
On YouTube, you can publish long-form in-depth videos that showcase your expertise and help viewers learn from your expertise.
On LinkedIn, you can publish thought-provoking written posts designed to engage people in your industry.
So the social media channels that you’ll choose are totally dependent on the goals you have.
I would recommend that you start off with only one or two social media channels, because the more that you add right away, then it becomes more overwhelming.
You’re going to spread yourself thin, and you’re not going to really get the results that you want. Then you can diversify and add more social channels later on, and you can repurpose your content of course.
The third step: do a social media audit.
That doesn’t need to be that complicated. You can focus basically on identifying what’s going well and what isn’t.
Here are a few things that you need to check, how fast or slow is your account growing in terms of followers. If there are any particular days or times in which you have gained or lost more followers than you typically do, and why. What content is generating the most engagement? From likes to comments, comments really help things go viral to even shares or even saves. Now, what are those content formats? What content types are doing the best, is it videos, images, carousel, written posts?
What types of messages that you just love and want to engage with the most? What causes your audience to leave the most comments? Tell me this, you’ve posted a ton on social already, leave a comment below and let me know, what type of content or what messaging has caused the most comments for you. And when you’re doing this,
think about what are user demographics that cause those type of people to engage most, what’s their age, their gender, their location, their language? …
Knowing exactly where your page is doing, will allow you to create a plan so that way you can double down on what’s working, and that’s important so you don’t waste time.
The fourth step: create a profile of the audience that you’re targeting.
What are the age groups that you’re going after? What are the interest that your target audience has? Is there a specific gender that’s more relevant to your brand? What are the cultural phenomenons
that your audience is really interested in? How can you leverage that more?
You can use Google Analytics if you have a website to get an idea of what people are already interested in or at least your audience is interested in.
Or you can use your Facebook page Insight and Instagram Insights
to do the same where existing audiences, what a valuable source for information that is that most people don’t look.
Because it has data for you that you should be using.
Beyond that, you should check out Facebook groups, forms, core Reddit. You can even use tools like Ubersuggest for research to figure out the pain points people have.
Because in Ubersuggest there’s a keyword ideas report that breaks into common questions that people are asking.
The fifth step: is competitive research.
Now, what I want you to do is create a list of five social media accounts
that are doing really well in your space. They don’t need to be exactly in your same industry but the closer they are the better.
Worst case they need to be in a similar nature-related industry.
Most importantly, these accounts should be targeting the same audience or similar audiences that you’re going after. So let’s say you’re focused your brand on business owners in the United States,
who are, let’s say 35 years or older. You’ll want to find accounts that cater to the same audience. They may not be about marketing like mine, they could be about just business advice. And here are some of the things that I would want to learn from these accounts.
In other words, that you would also want to learn from these accounts.
What are they doing to promote their content? How often are they posting? What are the types of content that they’re posting
from the content format like videos, images, carousels, shorts, reels
to even the messaging itself? What are the social channels that these brands are leveraging and how are they using these channels to cross-promote each other so they can get more followers on all the other social networks?
So let’s say you’re analyzing a Pinterest account, you can identify which keywords that they’re ranking for. What are they really doing
to make their Pinterest account popular? What are the posts that are gaining engagement versus the ones that aren’t?
Or on TikTok, is there anything that they’ve done that they’ve posted that’s gone viral? And what’s the topic of that content? Why did that go viral? What are the posts that they posted that didn’t do well?
Because that’s probably the stuff that you want to avoid.
Step six: it’s time to create a list of the different content types that work best for each social media channel.
Before you can actually start creating your plan and scheduling your content creation, it’s important to understand what works best
in each channel. After you’ve done your audit and competitive research, this becomes much easier. Your goal is to list all the different types of content and which platforms they work best on, so that you can create a schedule that makes sense for each channel.
Step seven, is to create a content calendar
that encompasses the channels you want to focus on,
and the content types that work best for each one of them.
Now, that you already know, who’s your target audience, what makes them tick, and the type of content that works best for each channel
is time to start using that knowledge to come up with the schedule.
You’ll want to use a tool like Hootsuite or Post Planner to organize your efforts to ensure that you’re on track to move forward as quick as possible so you get the results you’re looking for. Now, if you need help with your social media marketing, check the other articles on our site available in the Digital marketing section.
If you have any questions leave a comment below,
I’m here to help you out.
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