Over the past few years design social media strategy has become very important for all businesses and industries. Today almost every business can be found on social media but is it going to be enough just to make social accounts and keep updating profiles after a while? This is a big question that every business owner and marketers should ask themselves. Even many social media marketers do not fully understand the value social media can create for their businesses. Social media has become an integral part of marketing department or better to say a department within a department. Once you realize what it takes to be impressively active on social media and what it can produce then the first thing you need to do is to define your social media strategy that serves as catalyst for your business growth. The following are seven pillars of Social media strategy each pillar requires strategic thinking and analysis in order to define strategy.
Read more 7 important social media marketing tips
The first thing you need to ensure is to understand your business first. There are many examples of businesses on social media that are unaware of this simple fact that there should be strategic soldering between your business and social media. Their friends list is incompatible, there content is inappropriate and their updates are irrelevant. You have to consider social media as pure marketing channel and produce the content that is relevant and directly supports your business.
This is very important part that many people miss out or take it for granted. Social media is overloaded by diverse segments and audience without defining your audience you are unable to target them hence unable to achieve desired results. For instance if you are a local high street retail clothing brand then first definition of your audience is “people who are living in the same city” second definition might be “people who are living within few miles radius” then the third definition and so on. Once you define your audience it is easy to target them on social media.
Now that you have defined and purged your audience its the time to target them effectively. You should ask yourself couple of questions in this phase. How can I reach out my defined audience? With what content I should target my audience? The answers might be Facebook and rich media content respectively. In this phase you can include more questions more answers and more targeted definition.
Analyzing channels is yet another crucial element, this phase needs knowledge, experience and analysis of all available channels in social media. As social media is getting popular more and more social media platforms have been emerging. Choosing the right platform is important to extract desired results. For instance, if your target audience is “professionals working in marketing department” then choosing LinkedIn and putting more efforts in this platform would be the best action. Because you know that most of your target audience is sitting on LinkedIn.
It is not necessary that you should have social media accounts on all available platforms like; Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google +, Pinterest, Tumblr, StumbleUpon, Reddit, and so on but the important thing is to prioritize your social networks. If your target audience is sitting mostly on LinkedIn and you are more active on Facebook or Twitter then you are heading towards wrong direction. Another important thing is to create different content for different channels according to your business nature.
engaging audience requires involvement, commitment, care and ability to create interest which may not seem very easy thing to do. There is a need for research what your audience like, dislike and want. In this phase you should ask yourself few more questions like: What my audience like the most? What type of content they want to see? What are there problems? How their problems can be solved? And finally what type of content can create value for them? If you hit the nail right in the head during this phase you will have barely any difficulty in engaging your audience.
Once you are on the track keeping an eye on changing situations, insights and analytics of your existing social media strategy. This will provide you with useful information of what you are doing. Track your performance weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly. If you are not satisfied with your performance revise all the steps and see where you went wrong and how you can improve. Make necessary changes to the existing strategy and pay more attention towards improvement.
You may not generate results overnight you will have to stay focused, avoid losing control and be patient in order to get the things to start working for you….
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