How to develop your social media strategy
A social media strategy is a plan for everything you will do on social media. The strategy will show you if you are succeeding or failing online. The more specific a plan you create, the more effective it will be. Keep your strategy concise. It shouldn’t be so broad or hard to achieve that it is impossible to measure or is unattainable.
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Set SMART Goals
Set your objectives and goals. Without goals, you can’t measure how successful you’ve been.
Each goal you set needs to be:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Attainable
- Relevant
- Time-bound
In short, they need to be SMART.
Track meaningful metrics
There’s a lot of data to be tracked with social media, but it’s easy to get distracted by metrics like the number of followers and likes. These are easy to track but don’t prove much value. Instead, focus on metrics like engagement, click-through, and conversion rates.
Your social media goals should line up with your overall marketing aims. This makes it easier to show what the value of the work is, and convince any stakeholders why your social media efforts are worthwhile.
Create audience personas
Good social media means knowing exactly who your audience is and what they want to see online. Knowing your audience means you can create content that you know they will like, want to interact with, and share with their friends. Knowing your audience can help you turn followers into customers.
Who is your target customer? You should know lots of details about them, including:
- Age
- Location
- Average income
- Typical job title or industry
- Interests
If you know information like this about your followers and customers, you will be
able to interact with them more effectively as real people with actual wants and needs. You’ll know what the best way is to reach them and engage with them on and offline, and which social media content ideas will appeal most to them.
Gather data
Never make assumptions about your online audience. For example, you might think that only younger people use platforms like TikTok, whereas, the reality is that is a much wider range of ages active on the platform.
Social media analytics can give you a lot of useful information about who your followers are, as well as tell you things like where they live and how they interact with you. Use this data to refine your social media strategy.
Conduct a competitive analysis
Competitive analysis means you put in some work to understand who your competitors are and what they’re doing on social media that is and isn’t working. You can get a good idea of what is expected in your industry, and set some targets for your own social channels. It can also help you to spot gaps in other’s strategies that you can take advantage.
Perhaps one of your competitors is doing really well on Twitter but hasn’t invested any time into their Instagram. You can work most on the networks where your industry’s audience is not being served, rather than trying to compete with someone already dominating the platform.