A social media strategy is arguably the most essential factor required for any business or brand that wants to take up social media marketing. Without a social media strategy, you have no way of assessing the effectiveness of your social media posts, mostly because you don’t have an idea of what exactly you want these posts to achieve. A social media strategy helps to focus your efforts and overall, increases the value of your brand’s social media presence.
So what is a social media strategy?
Put simply, a social media strategy is a layout of what you want to achieve using social media. You’re definitely going to be posting a considerable amount of content and, basically, your social media strategy answers the question “why?”.
To develop a strong social media strategy. There are a few things need to put in place.
Firstly, you have to specifically define your business objectives. Your business objectives could be to increase awareness of your brand, to attract traffic to your website, or anything else. It could be one specific objective or it could be two or three of them. It all depends on the overall goal that you want your brand’s social media presence to achieve.
Without defined business objectives, it will be difficult, if not impossible for you to precisely estimate the progress your brand is making by being on social media.
Another important thing you have to do is define your target audience. On social media, you can’t get everybody’s attention and really, you don’t need to because it’s very unlikely that everybody is going to be interested in what your brand is offering. When you know the attributes of your ideal consumer, you can avoid creating unnecessary content in a futile effort to please everyone. Your target audience will have a couple of things in common. This may be their age, location, jobs, income, etc.
Precisely defining your target audience will go a long way in determining a lot of things such as the content you post, the form your content is going to take (e.g. videos, pictures), the voice or tone of your posts (and brand), even the choice of social media platforms you are going to use should depend largely on the audience you want to reach.
Finally, constantly assess and improve your social media strategy as much as possible. This is where Social Media Analysis comes in. This involves gathering and analyzing data about your previous social media activities. It will also be helpful for you to analyze the social media data of that your competitors, especially if you are just about to begin using social media for your brand marketing. It isn’t the easiest of tasks but is crucial because it helps you to know what works, so you can focus your efforts in that direction, and what doesn’t work, so you can avoid these things. There are a lot of social media analysis tools available online and some are free so you don’t have to worry about the cost.
Implementing these things will go a long way in improving your social media strategy and by extension, your brand’s value.