Social media strategies can be presented in a variety of ways. Two perspectives could be different:
1. How to prepare a Social Media Strategy that is unique for your Brand
2. To prepare a strategy to be presented to a client
Marketing professionals often use social media platforms without a plan. A strategy is needed that promotes transparency and helps you sell to internal and external stakeholders. In both cases, you need to answer these questions in order to determine the concept direction.
Documenting your Social Media Strategy in Seven Steps:
1. Learn about Goals and objectives
The goals of social media can be anything from increasing your share-of-voice to improving and increasing engagement to increasing followers, or even increasing sales & conversions. They could also include driving website traffic and increasing web traffic. Even though these goals are very different, you can achieve them by thoroughly studying your market and competitors. For example, improving your share of the voice may require you to aim at increasing your brand mentions between 60 and 70 %.
2. Find out what your competitors do
Becoming aware of what your competitors are doing is essential. You need to know what works and doesn't work in their case to be able to stand out and create your brand in social media. Understanding their engagement metrics, the themes that they are using and how their audiences accept them, their paid/organic posts mix, and social referral traffic can all help to justify your marketing approach.
3. Clear communication routes
Choose a strategy unique to you or go with the flow - Once your goals are defined and you understand what your competition is doing, define your approach by selecting content buckets (content categories), tone of voice ("tone"), themes/hashtags you want to employ for your social media positioning. The hashtags and themes will depend on your product/brand or the time of year.
By bouncing around ideas or brainstorming other marketing teams, you can determine the level of resonance for your strategy. It will allow you to strike the right balance in terms of creating unique content for social media while also applying industry best practices. When defining your strategy, it is important to understand your target audience. Brand personas can help simplify this process. It is important to understand their lifestyle, their weekend habits, their family and cultural values, their consumer behavior, etc.
4. Your mood board should be self-explanatory
The images and creatives help your audience to see how the plan is going to look. Images will compel your audience to take action if they draw their attention. The mood board you create as a manager of social media is an excellent way to give your writers, and most importantly your creative agencies or designers, a direction. Rich media such as animated formats or video could be included in the mood board Social Media Strategy & Services.
5. The right platform
It is important to understand where you are going, where your audience will be and what they want. In your cross-platform marketing strategy, you will differentiate between content buckets and themes, for Facebook or Instagram.
Avoid putting irrelevant material on the platforms that you use. Relevance will help you get the most out of your social media engine.
6. Calibrate your Listening
When creating a marketing strategy, social listening can be overlooked. Understanding your users' behaviour and knowing how to treat comments and messages via spontaneous replies, automated replies, or templates for expected positive/neutral/negative comments is necessary. By using listening tools to create alerts, you can track brand mentions online in real-time and compare your voice with competitors. Good listening tools also help improve response times.
7. Measurement Metrics
Don't forget to track your efforts on social media and estimate the results you hope to reach in relation to Reach, Share of voice, Sentiment, Clicks and Referral Visits.
