Chances are you have integrated social media into your marketing strategy. Social media has become so important to businesses that many have created a social media strategy alongside their marketing strategy, but the question remains; is it effective?
This blog will show you how to implement your social media strategy effectively in only three steps.
Studies have shown that the most effective way to create engagement is to keep it simple and you should only focus on where you see results. Bearing this in mind, the first step to take is Assessment.
Assessment: Your Audience
• Think about where you are as well as where you want to go and what the wins will be for your company along the way.
• Keep in mind that you should always put your audience first, which social media managers tend to forget.
• A good tool you could use to really find out what your audience’s needs, challenges and wants are is Survey Monkey. Post a (quick to fill out) survey on your social feeds and find out your customers behaviour. It is truly important for your strategy to know your audience so that you can create the right content, increase engagement, increase empathy and become the to-go-to source in your niche.
Assessment: Your Theme
When you have identified your audience, ask yourself what your theme would be? And by theme we mean one of the following:
• Loyalty
• Sales
• Awareness
These themes do interlink, but in your strategy stick to one goal, as you need to be consistent with your content! When you have set up your theme, get your whole team together and try to think about what your business stands for. What is your business’ identity? What is its heart and soul? For example, for Disney it is magic. For Apple it is innovation. What does YOUR business reflect? This is the voice of your strategy!
Assessment: Measuring Your Success
When you have answered the previous questions you need to start thinking of how you will measure your strategy’s success. This will depend on the theme you chose.
• Loyalty. You need to look at your influence, engagement and sentiment (Klout or EdgeRank Checker).
• Sales. You need to look at conversion rates as well as click rates and social e-commerce sales.
• Awareness. You need to look at your likes, subscribers, followers, share-ability, engagement, growth measurement and your brand awareness.
A good tip is to monitor the trends and developments in your industry and to take a close look at your immediate competitors.
Assessment: Make it Concrete/Write it Down
Write all your guidelines down, tailored to your business, goals and team, as they need to know how to handle negative comments and how to use the company’s social feeds and what they can post on the social feeds so there will be no confusion. Think about the following guidelines:
• Who in your team is responsible for what?
• Why are we using social media and what do we want to track?
• What social feeds do we use and focus on?
• At what time do we use social feeds and how many times do we check it?
Include examples of new blogs so new team members know what standard they should work to and what is going on.
Read our blog next week to find out the second step on how to implement your social media strategy effectively!