Why You Need a Social Media Strategy for Your Business
And how to write one
What is a social media strategy?
A social media strategy is a plan of how you will run your accounts. Without a strategy, your social media output will be listless. Creating your strategy will also help you fine-tune your objectives and act as a guide to follow. Due to the fact that business, as well as the world of social media, is ever changing you should create a new strategy every quarter. You can use the previous strategy as a base to work off, as not everything will need changing.
First steps
First off, before you can create a strategy you need to know what you want the outcome to be. Do you want to promote a particular service, or to increase your social presence? Or both? How many posts do you want to put out per day?
Write a short list of what you want to achieve. This is your overall focus. See examples:
- Raise maximum awareness across the relevant social audience.
- Grow an engaged following and cultivate a loyal customer base.
- Convey core values of the company
- Interact with the local community and generate leads through social listening.
Target Audience
It’s extremely important you know who your customers are as well as the type of people who you wish to target. Write a list of your current customer demographic. Then list the type of people who you wish would use your product, as well as the type of people who your product is suited. Consider these people when you are writing your posts and use the list as a base for your targeted ads.
Content Strategy
It’s time to think about a content plan, meaning what are you going say? What are you going to post about and when? Mix your core messages with sourced content and personal interest stories. Sourced content can be anything community based and news relevant to your business.
Creative Focus
Imagery is key on social media, with an image your post is more likely to be seen and will increase its reach. Facebook posts with an image see almost three times more engagement. As well as normal images, tailored visuals are a great way to promote your core messages. These can be designed easily on Canva.
Strategic Focusses
Strategic focusses are a great way to pinpoint what you want to promote. Think about the key focusses of the account, the USP’s and create a header for each. Next, using bullet points, fill out the focus in more detail. Talk about how you are going to promote each focus. For Instance, if you are a hotel, promoting the rooms would be one of your focusses.
Listening Keywords
Social media is more than tweeting. It’s also about listening to what people are saying about your business and finding people to interact with to make a business sale. Come up with five relevant keywords and sentences that you can use to listen for people talking about these subjects. Let’s use a hotel in Leeds for example. A hotel could listen for ‘people coming to Leeds.’ When found and time specific of course, the hotel could respond saying “Great! What are you planning on doing in Leeds?” Only when the person responds should you then go in for the sale.
Research Competitors
It’s important to research who your competitors are, not so you can copy their content, but learn what has worked for them as well as not worked. You can then put this into practise and make your content all the better for it.
Monthly Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
It’s a good idea to set yourself some targets that you can work for. There are four main ones you want to be looking at
Growth, Impressions, Engagements and Link clicks. You’ll know after the first few months whether you need to adjust these or not.
To start with I would suggest working towards,
- Growth 100–150 combines across all platforms
- Impressions 50,000–100,000
- Engagements 300–500
- Link Clicks 50–100
I hope you find this helpful and it helps you to focus on your business’s social media goals.
