Insight

Seven steps to creating your social media strategy

Everyone knows they should be doing it. We hear the stats every day… “More than 1 billion people use Facebook daily”… “YouTube has over 215 million monthly users”… but where does your business fit in?

There are plenty of examples of brands and businesses using social media to its full potential, however we also see a number of companies struggling. A lot of businesses fall into the trap of trying to use every single social media platform possible, whilst others are focusing their efforts on platforms that just aren’t suitable for their target audience.

One thing that every business should have in place is a social media strategy. This will help streamline their efforts and ensure that they’re getting the best possible ROI out of social. We know that drawing up a strategy sounds like a time-consuming job, so we’ve got a few pointers to get you started:

  1. Goals and objectives

This is fundamental to establishing your social media strategy. Many businesses start using social media without a clear objective in mind. Are you trying to increase website referrals? Get more people to watch your videos? Whatever your company’s objectives are, social media is there to support them.

  1. KPIs

With your goals and objectives in mind, it is important to set up some measurable KPIs. For example, if one of your objectives is to increase social media referrals to your website, you can use Google Analytics to measure this over any period of time. You can then compare this to a previous period of time and measure your performance.

Having clear, measurable KPIs allows you to analyse your performance regularly.

  1. Target audience

So now you know what you’re trying to achieve on social media, it’s time to identify who you’re trying to target. Is there a certain age demographic that is important to your company’s growth? Do you want to target those within a certain radius of your premises?

If you can identify two or three clear target audiences, this again ensures you are concentrating your efforts on those that are most important to your business.

  1. Platforms

OK, so this is an important one. Like we said earlier, we see a number of businesses spreading themselves thin across a number of different social media platforms. What we end up seeing is that they can’t produce quality content across all of these platforms. What’s more important is that you choose the platforms that your target audience is using.

Have you identified 18-30 year olds as your target audience? It’s pretty likely that they are using Instagram or Snapchat. This is where you’ll communicate with them. Similarly, if targeting those over 40 years of age is important to your business, you’ll find that YouTube and Facebook could be the best places to talk to these guys.

Our advice is to identify two or three platforms (at most) that you know your target audience is using, and concentrate your efforts on these. No-one is going to think bad of your business just because you don’t have a Tumblr page!

  1. Content

Let’s recap. You’ve established your objectives, put clear KPIs in place, identified your target audience and know which platforms they’re using. The next step is to work out what types of content they like to see.

For example, if you’ve identified Instagram as one of the platforms you’re going to use, you need to ensure you’re producing regular, quality imagery and video. This is what Instagram users like to see.

It’s important that you’re giving your audience what they want to see.

  1. Produce content

So you’ve got your framework in place. Now it’s time to produce! There can be a number of people involved at this stage; social media manager, executives, graphic designers, videographers, agencies. It’s important to put an editorial process in place so that everyone involved knows exactly who is producing what.

Equally important is a content calendar. With the possibility of various types of content going live across a number of platforms on the same day, it is important that everyone knows what is going out when, and on which platform. Hootsuite has a fantastic template to get you started.

  1. Measure and analyse

It’s great that you’re now producing regular content for your target audience on the platforms they are using. Is it working though? Here at Red Marlin we regularly analyse our social media performance, based on the KPIs that we had set out earlier in our strategy. We recommend that, at the very least, you measure your performance every month.

From this, if you find that some things aren’t quite working, you can adjust your efforts. The key here is to DO MORE OF WHAT’S WORKING and less of what’s not.

We hope these seven steps will get you started on creating your own strategy and ensuring that your business is making the most of the social media landscape. If you’re looking for help with your social media strategy why not get in touch with Red Marlin to see what we could do for you?

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