[su_highlight background=”#bcff99″]Every business looking to achieve success through social media needs to have a well written social media strategy. A social media content strategy designed to reach their customers and get the desired result.[/su_highlight] Just as social media channels are not equal in scope, demographics and reach. All social media channels might not be right for your company goals.
[su_spacer size=”10″]
Create a Winning Social Media Strategy
Your social media strategy needs to be market specific just for your company. What works for a big box competitor with a large advertising budget and huge staff may not work or be practical for your market. Your custom social media strategy should contain everything from your goals, your target audience, and what that audience wants or needs. Then you can decide which social media channels can be utilized to best reach your customers.
Everyone from the business owner, to in-house staff, to your hired gun Social Media Specialist must be involved in setting the goals and building your branded social media strategy.
Setting attainable, measurable goals is an important component to a good social media strategy. These will help you achieve the results you are looking for. Set measurable goals like getting more sales, customer leads, website traffic, and building credibility and expanding the brand image.
Likes, followers and retweets should be a much smaller component of every business’ main goal; Making a Profit! A strong ROI can be achieved by leveraging social media to build online credibility. If your brand is credible and trustworthy ‘Likes’, followers and retweets will happen organically.
How to Create a Winning Social Media Strategy
Generate Leads, Drive Traffic, Build Credibility and Brand Awareness
For best results, begin with only two or three goals. Having too many goals can affect your focus. Once you have a list of goals it’s important to figure out your target audience.
The basis of every marketing strategy is the target audience. You need to know four things about your audience; Who they are, what they want, how to reach them, how to please them. If you can’t please them and give them what they want, they won’t interact with your social media updates. They also won’t buy your products or give way to forming any relationship with you.
Knowing who your target audiences are and what they want will help you choose the right social media, create relevant content, and write the perfect social media updates.
Leveraging Social Media to Build Online Credibility
Once you know who your target audience is, choosing your social media will be simplified. You want to choose social media channels that are frequented by your target audience. Looking at social media demographics can also help you with this. For instance, Pew has complete data, collected last fall, of the demographics for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.
If you find that most of your audience are baby boomers and senior citizens, then the right social media to use might be Facebook since 45% of internet users age 65 or older now use Facebook.
[clickToTweet tweet=”Create a Winning #SocialMedia Strategy that Drives Revenue – Generate Leads, Drive Traffic, Build Credibility and #BrandAwareness with Social Media ” quote=”Create a Winning Social Media Strategy that Drives Revenue – Generate Leads, Drive Traffic, Build Credibility and Brand Awareness with Social Media.”]
Perform a Social Media Audit
As stated, start out with only a few relevant social media platforms. Remember that having more than 3 or 4 social media accounts means more work (and cost) for your in-house team or the hired specialist. I suggest you do a simple social media audit. Inspect your current social media activities to determine where you are, what you are doing right and what you are doing wrong.
If you have been using social media for a while, you already have analytic available to compare. Begin by analyzing everything from what you have posted. What types of posts worked best, what posting time was most effective, who are your key industry influencers, etc.
NOTE: If you are new to social media I suggest you look at pages owned by your competitors to see how well their social media performance compares to the industry standard.
You can use the results you get from this audit to continue doing more of the effective things and to tweak or discard the ineffective. If you don’t have any business social accounts on which to perform an audit, the best option may be to start by contacting a Social Media SEO Specialist.
Prepare a Social Media Content Strategy
Prepare a social media content strategy that includes everything: blog posts, white papers, well written social media updates, photos, quotes, videos, etc. The first thing you must remember while creating your social media strategy is that every social media platform is different; what works on one network might not work on another. This image by Social Rank is a fun reminder that each social media site comes at content from a different perspective.
Don’t make the mistake of scheduling the same update on all social media. Share different things on different social media and craft unique updates for each. Use the data you collect from your audit and other analyses to see what your audience wants and give it to them.
Your content strategy should be based on your goals, your audience, the social media you are using. Also, what has worked for you in the past and what is working for your competitors. You want to use all this together to help you achieve your desired results.
PRO Tip: Start a Company Blog
Make sure you have a company blog where you create and provide fresh original content and industry announcements. Providing free quality content can be a great way to build trust and with trust comes credibility. Remember, people on social media don’t want a sales pitch. They want to be engaged and there’s no better way to do this than with content. Make sure you create fresh content, mix in a little from other sources. Have a proper promotion plan to expose it to as many readers as possible.
A good social media content strategy will help you drive traffic, build trust and a better social media presence eventually generating sales. Use all the data you have collected from the previous steps. Get inside your reader’s heads and create the content they want to read and share.
Perform Audits and Performance Updates Regularly
As time goes by your audience preferences will evolve. They will use social media at different times, for different purposes and the content they engage with will also change. This fact alone makes it extremely important to perform social media audits and performance updates regularly. Monitor the techniques you are using; are they still functioning to their full effect or if there has been a reduction in their effectiveness? Use this new information to make modifications to your social media strategy and improve it.
Also look at your competitors’ strategies. See if they have made any modifications and how this is working out for them. Again, their new techniques can be implemented into your strategy.
Keep Up to Date with The Latest Research
There are a lot of companies and social networks releasing data on what the current trend is at the moment. This fresh data will help you understand how your target audience is changing and what social media updates are working. Use this new data in your strategy to get better results.
In Conclusion
Social media success takes time. It doesn’t happen instantly. You might notice some positive changes at the beginning. Take the right steps by collecting data and giving your audience what they want instead of assuming. But achieving the goals you have set can take 3 to 6 months. Plan accordingly and be patient.
Michael Klasno is SERP Sniper – Building local optimized websites for Attorneys, Law Firms and Business Professionals in Houston and Southeast Texas.
Michael Klasno is a consummate Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Specialist with an impressive 20-year tenure in the digital marketing landscape. Throughout two decades, Michael has been at the forefront of evolving website design & SEO strategies, seamlessly integrating the latest trends with time-tested methodologies.
His SEO expertise encompasses a vast array of skills, including keyword research, technical SEO, (both on-page and off-page) Local SEO, Google Business Profile optimization, SEO auditing, competitive analysis, and content strategy formulation.
“By building a cost effective corporate or business website that looks great and has a high conversion rate you can dominate the organic search results.”
