Social media provides many business benefits, from increasing website traffic and sales, creating brand recognition and customer support, and even helping companies meet their business goals. By developing and executing an effective plan on social media, your goals can be accomplished while leaving an indelible mark online.
In order to ensure your social media strategies are working as intended, you should regularly assess them and monitor them. By doing this, you can tweak them by trying new formats of content or targeting new audiences.
Elevate Your Online Presence and Business Impact
Social media strategies provide businesses with numerous opportunities to reach new audiences and engage with existing customers, but for maximum effectiveness, it is imperative that a clear plan be created in advance and followed. This plan should include setting goals, understanding which types of content resonate best with audiences, and formulating an efficient implementation strategy for your strategy.
Step one of creating a social media strategy is identifying which platforms your target audience utilizes and understanding what type of content will drive engagement. For instance, if Instagram is your main social media platform of choice, creating high-quality, eye-catching visuals for posts might help drive more engagement with followers than posting regular text posts; you could also try sharing behind-the-scenes photos or inviting customers to post photos featuring your products — this helps build social proof and trust between followers and brand.
Setting clear plans will enable you to stay on track and ensure all of your efforts align with your broader marketing objectives, which can enable you to measure and assess their impact on a monthly, quarterly, or annual basis. In addition, setting time-based goals helps set realistic expectations while giving your efforts a sense of urgency.
An effective social media strategy also allows companies to identify and respond quickly to customer feedback in real-time. If someone complains about a product or service, a prompt reply can go a long way toward rebuilding trust with consumers and building brand loyalty – especially important when reviewing online reviews.
Social media strategies also enable you to leverage features such as hashtags, locations, and tagging that allow for easier reach of new audiences in certain geographic locations or who share common interests – an effective and cost-efficient means of expanding local reach.
Identify Your Goals
At the core of any successful social media strategy is setting clear and measurable goals to accomplish with social media. Your goals should align with the overall operations of your business; some common ones include increasing brand recognition, driving website traffic, generating leads, and engaging audiences.
After you’ve identified your desired business impact, the next step should be identifying social media metrics to measure your success. Most social media platforms provide some form of analytics for business accounts such as impressions, reach, engagement rates, and click-through rates; but ultimately which metrics you focus on depends on what KPIs and goals have been established by your business.
Brand mentions comments and tags, follower count, post impressions, and social shares per blog post or video share are all critical metrics when trying to increase the return on investment from social media. Furthermore, your strategy may require tracking conversion rates or other actions that help link social media efforts back to business results.
Consider the value of social media customer service. Direct messaging or automated responses to inquiries can make or break your reputation; according to the Sprout Social Index(tm), 53% of brands stated customer support as part of their social media strategy.
As you select metrics that will best guide your social media strategy, ensure they are regularly tested and assessed to provide flexibility to adapt to changes in audience, industry, or technology and to ensure that social media efforts continue working towards your desired business impact.
One way to keep tabs on your progress is to keep a running total of the milestones you’ve accomplished along the way. Hootsuite’s Social Inbox offers an efficient and straightforward method for tracking this information over time and will keep you on the path toward meeting or exceeding your goals.
Craft a Plan
Your social media strategy should take into account both newcomers to social media as well as veterans of using it for years. The first step should be identifying goals – these can vary depending on overall marketing and business goals but typically include creating brand recognition in the marketplace, increasing knowledge about your target audience, or increasing sales. Tactics used can vary, but the key is ensuring they all directly align with desired results that can be measured using specific metrics.
The next step should be creating a content calendar to organize and manage your efforts. A content calendar allows you to keep in mind important dates such as holidays, anniversaries, or milestones that might be relevant to your audience. Furthermore, having such an organizer allows you to easily see how well your goals are progressing against targets as well as provide the data to make necessary improvements if needed.
Social media dashboards can also help you plan out your efforts by helping to track performance and manage all accounts effectively. They allow you to preplan posts in advance as well as stay aware of what other brands are doing to stay competitive.
Once you understand your goals and how they’ll be measured, the next step should be creating an action plan. One effective method may be setting out a roadmap with specific, measurable, and attainable milestones that tie back directly to business objectives through social media efforts.
Establish a set of KPIs that will allow you to measure the success of each channel, such as reach, engagement, and click-through rates for each platform you utilize. When running paid ads or paid ad placements, conversion tracking and link clicks will also be key indicators of success.
Execute Your Plan
Marketers need to take an expansive view when creating their social media strategies. Since social media evolves constantly and audiences demand something fresh, it’s crucial that marketers regularly evaluate and modify their strategy so that they can identify which campaigns have performed the best and build new ones.
To help your social media team make more informed decisions, it’s vital that they set clear goals and monitor relevant metrics. Depending on your objectives, such metrics could include share of voice (SOV) or conversation rates as well as click-throughs and conversions. Routinely reviewing these measurements ensures your efforts align with business goals while producing an ROI (return on investment).
An invaluable metric to measure is video views. Social media platforms such as TikTok and Instagram provide various methods for reporting engagement with videos, from traditional counts to more detailed breakdowns of engagement data. Metrics like these help determine how well your video content resonates with audiences as well as which types they prefer.
Your social media team should also pay close attention to competitors and emerging trends, and experiment with any type of content that resonates with audiences; perhaps adding engaging Q&A posts might increase ROI.
Finally, companies must establish and implement social media policies to guide employees as brand representatives on social media platforms such as Facebook. Doing so can prevent legal issues or public embarrassment while upholding the company’s image.
Social media is a powerful way for businesses to reach their target audience and foster a supportive community. If implemented successfully, a sound social media strategy can drive more traffic, increase sales, and enhance brand image – but without proper management tools such as Kontentino, it could quickly become time-consuming and cumbersome. To simplify things and save yourself time use a central dashboard such as this to manage all accounts from one place – perfect!
