Developing a Social Media Strategy

Does your business have a social media strategy?

Social media is more than creating accounts on the ever-popular Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and then posting your pre-made advertisements or “Happy National Donut Day” graphics.

Social media should be about creating and maintaining and conversation with your audience through the appropriate social media channels.

Developing a social media strategy should be clear, succinct, and simple.

1. Competitor Analysis

Take a peek at what your competitors are up to on social media. Visit their corporate website to gain access to social media links, then visit each of their social media channels.

• What channels are in use?
• What is their following?
• What is their content strategy?
• What are they doing well?

(If you have an existing Facebook Page, you can add competitors to the “Watch-List” that allows you to simplified statistics regarding your competitor’s performance.)

2. Target Audience

As you’ve heard before, you need to understand YOUR target audience. If you think that “everyone” is your audience, you need to ask yourself these questions:

• Who are your current customers?
• What customer group do you want to grow?
• What are their demographics? Psychographics? Interests?

3. Goals & Objectives

Before launching a Facebook Page, or starting an Instagram account, you need to understand why your business should be using social media.

• Increase in-house sales / online sales
• Increase blog readership
• Increase app downloads

Answering this question will start to guide your social media strategy, because it will point your content in the right direction.

4. Strategy

No – sharing the exact same content, including text and image, to all of your social media channels is NOT a strategy. In fact, if you choose to engage multiple social media channels, you should be committed to creating unique content for EACH channel. Below is a chart of the character limits, optimal image size, and hashtag use for each. Simply reviewing the chart will remind social media administrators that each social media channel is unique and should be treated as such.

In addition, each social media channel is visited by a unique population. Pew Research has prepared some in-depth research on this topic, including the below demographic analysis:

Depending on your target audience, you may choose to enable a specific social media mix. Simply looking at the popular social media in relation to age brackets will provide a strong indication of which social media channels are most suitable.

In addition, content can be one of the most challenging aspects to social media management. The thought of posting content daily, or at minimum a few times per week can be daunting. Simply posting corporate advertisements or Happy National Day of Awareness just won’t cut it.

• What images/visual will you use?
• Will you be directing them to a specific website/webpage?
• Will you engage user-generated content?
• Do you have a theme for your content?

This is the tip of the iceberg to starting the development of a social media strategy.

What are your social media strategy questions? Share below!