Developing a strategy for social media is essential if you want to ensure that you will be able to achieve the best return on your investment for your social media program. That said, there are certain steps you need to take to develop a social media strategy which I’ve detailed below. As a marketing consultant with over 20 years of experience, I understand that there’s a good chance you’ll have some questions, so feel free to review some additional helpful resources on social media here.
Defining Your Social Media Goals, Objectives, and KPIs
Some examples of what your objectives might include: driving leads to your website, strengthening your position against your competition, and strengthening investor relations. The coinciding goals for these objectives might include: increasing brand awareness (these metrics illuminate your current and potential audience); increase engagement (using social media can provide quick access to FAQs, showcase content about your brand, and share other vital decision-making criteria instantly and with scale); and increase traffic on your website.
Finally, you’ll need to identify what your KPIs are. KPI’s are your key performance indicators which are the specific metrics you’ll use to determine if your goals and objectives are being met. Some examples include: Grow followers on Twitter and LinkedIn to 500 by end of 2020; double the amount of social engagement (comments, @mentions, likes); double the traffic to your website, via social media.
Defining Your Target Audience
Understanding who your target audience is is critical whenever you’re developing your social media strategy. There are a few key things to ask yourself for each of your target audiences. I’ll provide examples in the case that you’re a business targeting other businesses with your service or product.
- What is their job title?
- What is their education level?
- What are their needs?
- What are their pain points? Meaning, what are some problems they may have which your product/service could address.
- What are their preferred social networks? If you’re a b2b, you’ll most likely already understand that the best social media channels, in this case, are Twitter, LinkedIn first and then Facebook and Instagram.
- Lastly, ask what are their unique characteristics?
Executing a Social Media Competitor Analysis
A social media competitor analysis is where you’ll research and identify what your competitors are doing in order to ensure that you’re at least on par with them. You’ll want to analyze your top three competitors and capture the following information:
- Which social media channels are they active on?
- How many followers do they have on each channel?
- How often are they posting?
- Are they running ads?
Content Strategy Plan
Once you’ve determined which social media channels you should be active on, you need to determine what each platform is good for (in terms of helping you achieve your goals/objectives) as well as what type of content you’ll publish there. For example, some types of content you may consider if you’re a b2b is: announcing financial and other key information, developments, esp. via press releases, published mentions, videos of top executives, testimonials, videos of your product or service “in action”.
Lastly, you’ll simply want to identify how often you’ll be posting on each channel and how often and in what meaningful way will you engage with your followers and/or targets. If you’re still stuck and would like some help marketing your business, feel free to learn more by contacting a professional agency.
