Creating Social Media Strategy

Proper planning is critical to a successful creation of social media strategy because it is a fast-moving platform. It is rooted in the idea that social media is a two-way connection platform. Here, organizations communicating need a medium to send their message quickly so that a response comes back right away. This is a step-by-step- guide to creating social media strategy.

Methods for Creating Social Media Strategy

As mentioned, planning is always essential. Now, here are incredible methods for creating a socmed strategy.

Grab Buy-Ins

It’s significant that there is a buy-in for your invasion into the socmed world. You may very well consider it as a free asset. You need to invest a lot such as time and money. Whether you’re paying for publicity, it’s a must. 

Various partners should be mindful of your online plans whether internal or external. You also need a sign-off for budget or other resource requirements.

You will also be forced to research and plan the next step once you address the many stakeholders. 

Get a View of the Landscape

Don’t be too quick. Social media is not just an instrument for personal communication. Take your time to understand the landscape. See the bigger picture. Consider the following:

• What are the current discussions that are relevant to your brand, industry, and competitors?
• Are they facts?
• Where are the discussions taking place?
• Who are discussing? What can you contribute to the conversation? Is it relevant?

Check out BrandsEye (www.brandseye.com), Radian6 (www.radian6.com), or other online monitoring tools that can “listen” to discussions. This is a great part of planning. However, you may also start with free tools when you’re still in the initial stage, such as Google Alerts (www.google.com/alerts).  

Analyze before Creating Social Media Strategy

With your collected data, start analyzing. Consider your social media, branding, and your broader marketing. Think about your communication and business challenges. You should consider these things when analyzing the information at your hands. The data collected must be about local marketing and the business atmosphere. 

The results of your analysis must contain:

• All the social channels and platforms that your brand must take over, depending on where your customers are
• Existing non-official groups or communities created by fans and other people
• A background of the discussions (volume, frequency, and content). Look for recurring themes.
• What the competitors are doing in the channel
• Potential influencers in your industry.

Set Your Goals

These are the outcomes you want out of your socmed strategy. Most of the time, it is based on your business challenges. Or your marketing challenges. Decide how you will maximize the platform for your company and set goals for each.

These objectives have to be tangible, so set key performance indicators (KPI), along with benchmarks and targets. 

A SMART objectives stands for:

Specific

Measurable

Achievable

Realistic

Timed

If your goal, for example, is to grow fans around your brand, then your KPI must be the number of your followers. You can set a target of 5000 on Facebook over the span of five months.

Create an Action Plan

Start listing down your action plan once you have measurable objectives for your social media strategy. Here, you need to guarantee that you have all important documents and processes for your plan.

Your action plan includes the following:

• Choosing the roles of the project team and other shareholders
• Identifying what tools in social media you will utilize
• Stick to a certain frequency and volume for your social media strategy, as well as how quickly you will respond
• Have a plan of conversation 
• Consider guidelines for your tone of voice, FAQs, community guidelines, and content plans

Implement Your Social Media Strategy

This is the most interesting part where you put your plan, research, and thoughts into action. Start setting up your social media based on the guidelines. Notify the shareholders that the engagement plan is about to start. Check if your tracking tools are working as well. Monitor mentions and responses to messages with the general plan in mind. In case of changes, always adapt.

Track Your Social Media Strategy, Analyze, and Optimize

When you’re marketing digitally, it’s easier to track user interaction. With the comprehensive information offered to you, you may learn and improve your efforts and make decisions. 

Record and note your social media campaign progress regularly. Then, set intervals for analyzing every few months. There are some tools you can use for tracking social media to gather enough information for your report.

Platform Insights

Some social media sites like Facebook and YouTube already have built-in analytics and insights.

These are the most basic tools to use for reporting your progress, They tell the number of your followers, the interactions with your content, and more.

Web Analytics

Make sure to tag links if you are using social media to send traffic to your own site. You can track your campaign through parameters with Google Analytics.

URL shorteners

Additionally, tools like URL shortening services also provide data on how many people are clicking the links you share. There are other data from this too. Such as the number of clicks, and where they come from.

Some URL shortening services include bit.ly and ow.ly.

Online monitoring software

An important investment you need to make in your social media campaign is an online monitoring software. These kinds of tools help you keep track of mentions on your brand. They also help you understand the opinions and their value. You also want to track your reputation on certain trends from time to time using an online monitoring service.

Social Media Dashboards 

If you want to centralize the management of your social media properties, there are various services that will make it easier for you. Social media dashboards also make collaborating management more convenient. These kinds of tools help you integrate analytics data. It analyses a number of different sources to make reporting much easier. 

Some social media dashboards include the following: 

• HootSuite (www.hootsuite.com)
• Spredfast (www.spredfast.com)
• CoTweet (www.cotweet.com)
• Sprout Social (www.sproutsocial.com)
• Socialbakers (www.socialbakers.com)
• Tweetstats (www.tweetstats.com)

© Image credits to Harrison Candlin