Importance of Social Media Strategies

Social media strategies are how the company, plans to use social platforms to achieve effective communications with prospects and generate a following on the platform.

Tips on how to develop a social media marketing plan

It is vital in promoting good public relations. Despite the potential benefits, many brands do not exploit this avenue to its full potential. Venturing out into the current world of social media requires unique strategies:

1. Defining Your Goals

Many people are accessing the social media platforms, and many could be your future customers. Therefore, you should know what your ultimate aim is before implementing your social media strategy.

You can accomplish many things through social media. Brand awareness and increasing web traffic are the top goals of most brands. Alternatively, social media can help enhance the retention and loyalty with long-term customers. Finally, you can increase sales by selling through social media, it works, and you can reach more people.

2. Select the Right Channels and Outcomes

Knowing what you want before even selecting the channel is important. For lead generation, determine the number of new signups you want from social media.

Also, know the number of new followers you want per month. One critical thing to remember is that the business requires a following before you can see results.

Finally research on the channels that likely lead to more engagements such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Each platform is unique in the role it plays in the purchase cycle. For example, Facebook is suitable for people who want to share content and find promotions.

Hence before going further, know the role of each channel to your business and the one your customer will likely use.

3. Know the Audience before Creating Content     

The most exciting brands on social media generate the most engagements. In this time and day, you cannot afford to be boring. Or always posting about your products and how great the business is doing.

To drive engagements know the audience, and find out what they like. Research on the articles they read, videos they watch, and how they spent their time online.

The social media strategy aims to gain this portion of their time, and you won’t get them unless you have compelling, shareable, rousing press releases, news, images, videos and infographics.

4. Know the Competitors

The biggest stimulator of the business to improve is the competitors. If you can’t sleep soundly at night thinking about competition, you are lucky.

Look for the strongest competitor on social media and find out what they are doing right. But, don’t focus on this; find what they are not doing. Ideally, capitalise on their mistakes.

If they are Tweeting once per week, do it twice. Don’t appear aggressive, take things slow, but always seek to outpace them.

5. Creating Content

Have you ever heard of an editorial calendar? Media companies use it all the time to plan articles and publications months before they are written. Social media strategy requires the same approach. What matters is the content and frequency of your posts. You can get content from anywhere in the organisation, be creative and encourage everyone to participate.

Engagements are happening, and reputations are being built each second by businesses online. If your company is not involved, your competition and a significant portion of your customers are always active.