How to build a social media strategy

Why is social media important?

Building a following on social media gives you the opportunity to reach out to new and current customers, and enables the opportunity to convert with every post. It offers a space to increase your brand voice and content, which in turn improves brand loyalty, with customers building a rapport with you online.

You’re also allowing your brand to become a ‘person’ on social media, customers like to buy from other people, and so building this relationship and seeing the person behind the brand can increase conversion and brand loyalty.

Social Media is also a great way to increase your inbound traffic, with every successful profile you create, generating another path to your website. If the content you create is valuable and quality, then more potential leads will link to your website, and these will hopefully convert to sales in some instances.

How to build a Successful Social Media Strategy?

A social media strategy can really help you focus on what you need to be doing to build a powerful brand identity.

Goals

Before you start, you should define your goals, what do you really want to get from social media marketing? For instance, it may be to reach a bigger audience to push through to your website, whatever it is, make sure your goals are SMART.

• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Relevant
• Time-Bound

This will allow you to make goals that you can measure and evaluate for your business, rather than aiming for 5,000 followers for no particular reason!

Competition

The chances are your competition are going to be on social media, so learn from them. Take a hand full of competitors and research what they are doing on social media and what works for them, this will help you develop effective content. The key is to ‘create not copy’ use the information that you see, to evaluate your end goals and understand what your audience may be responding to.

If you’re using a social media management tool, they should have inbuilt areas where you can monitor your competitor’s pages and engagements.
You can find out more in our blog post; beating your competition with our competitor analysis guide

Consistency

Make sure all of your profiles are aligned, it’s so important that a customer see’s the same profile image and bio on twitter as they do on Instagram. The information in your bio needs to be optimised with keywords your audience will be searching. If you’re not sure what keywords may be ideal for your business, you can use Google’s Keyword Planner to help you research words and phrases that may perform well.

Calendar

Plan ahead, the easiest way to keep on top of social media is to make a social media content calendar. This way you can chart key dates such as product launches or holidays to make sure your social media accounts are talking about them.

You don’t want to wake up each day and try to figure out something interesting to say on all of your social media channels. Do leave space for flexibility, something may happen in the news or related to your business that you want to post about and can’t plan for. On the whole though, you’ll want to have a monthly plan for posts.

There are many different social media tools built to manage your posts ahead of time such as Sprout Social, Hootsuite and TweetDeck. Do your research and see what fits best for you and your business. 

Content

Make sure your content is strong, and vary the media you are posting from images, videos, infographics to text, you’ll also want to vary the subjects you talk about from tips, news, interviews, behind the scenes and promotional. It’s really important to find a balance with promotional content if your social media posts are too sales related, this will ultimately turn off your audience, giving them a reason to unfollow.

The content you do create should fit with your brand identity, use your brand colours where possible, talk in the tone of voice that fits your company and avoid sharing posts that do not align to your audience. Make sure your images and videos are fully optimised for your correct platform, an image size perfect for Facebook definitely won’t work well on Instagram. You can find a list of all relevant social media images sizes here.

Use hashtags wisely, and do your research to find out which ones are bringing people to your profile or that your target audience is interacting with. Too many random hashtags can look spammy and put people off.

Community

It’s not all about you, although it’s important to share relevant, interesting content, on a well thought out profile, the conversation isn’t one-sided. Make sure you interact with other profiles, brands and customers.

People are more likely to engage with your brand if you engage and make an effort with them. Always respond to your messages as quickly as you can; like, share and comment on others content with relevant responses. You’ll start to see people responding to you.

Platform

Unfortunately, it’s not as easy as copying and pasting from one social media platform to another, and you’ll need to think of content that’s appropriate for each platform. Here are a few tips on how to tailor content for each social media profile with key aspects and demographics to consider.

Facebook

• Work Events
• Sharing relevant content
• Personal Moments
• Female 23 – 37 year olds

Twitter

• Industry updates
• Conversation starters
• Relevant retweets
• Female 18 – 29 year olds

Instagram

• Inspiration
• Behind the scenes
• Personal Moments
• Female 18 – 34 year olds

LinkedIn

• Professional
• Thought Leadership
• Business News
• Male 25 – 44 year olds

Pinterest

• Inspiration
• Product Images
• Re-pin motivational images
• Female 25 – 34 year olds

Perhaps think about some other social media platforms that aren’t as well known, they may suit your brand well, and allow you to tap into a previously unknown- audience, with less competition.
Try not to feel too overwhelmed by social media, pick a couple of platforms to start interacting with at first. You’ll see much better results if you focus on 2 platforms really well than try to overstretch yourself with a lot.

Social media can be a huge pull on time, and it can be easy to get lost by scrolling through your Facebook feed or in pretty Instagram pictures. Try and schedule Social Media time into your diary, and use that time to plan, post and engage with content wisely. Of course be ready to respond to people where necessary, but don’t become a slave to social.