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steps for creating a solid social media strategy

A social media strategy is critical to stand out from your competition and make on social media,

Here are the steps you can follow to create the ultimate social media marketing plan that will help you reach your business goals

How can you optimize your social media strategy? Check out the infographic below?

1 Define Your Goals  

The first and most crucial step of creating a social media strategy is that of setting your goals. Without a goal in mind, it won’t be easy to channel your efforts to reach it.

Some of your goals can be

Increase you reach

Increase the number of leads

Improve your sales

Drive more traffic to your website

2 Define Your Target Audience

It is critical to figure out your target audience before starting your social media marketing campaigns. If you don’t know who your target customer is, you won’t know who to advertise to. Define your target audience based on their demographics, location, and interests.

Try to find their pain points to create marketing campaigns that show your product and services can solve their problems. It will help you plan your content in a better manner.

3 Determine Which Social Media Channels Are Right for your Business.

Start by reviewing the major social media channels and what they’re best for your Business.

Facebook: Reach a broad audience, run advertisements, and share live videos.

Twitter: share timely news, post, and videos of products, staff, and customers.

LinkedIn: Make professional connections, share industry, or company news, and post jobs.

Instagram: share quality photos and videos of products, staff, and customers.

Pinterest: Share product photos, drive website traffic, and increase sales,

YouTube: Share instructional videos, funny videos, product review videos.

Snapchat: Connect with a younger demographic through timely images and videos.

4 Analyze the Competition.

Competitive analysis is collecting and analyzing competitor information and intelligence on their business behaviors, customers, and more.

An important thing to keep in mind when planning to do a social media competitive analysis is that you shouldn’t just be thinking of your immediate competitors. To get the edge, you’ll need to expand your research and benchmark your performance against your industry and region.

Look up a couple of your competitors and analyze their social media presence.

Competitor# 1

Number of Followers:

What they’re posting:

How often they’re posting:

The average number of likes and comments:

Competitor #2

Number of Followers:

What they’re posting:

How often they’re posting:

The average number of likes and comments:

Cont’d

Based on your account analysis, learn from what they do well and where they can improve.

What Competitor #1 does well:

Where they could improve:

What Competitor #2 does well:

Where they could improve:

5 Create a Social Media Schedule

Start by making a list of all the different types of content you’d to share. Examples include helpful articles, staff photos, links to the event schedule, instructional videos, and discounts.

Once you have a few different content ideas, start plugging these ideas into a simple calendar. You can also a free management tools like Buffer or public or Buffer.

6 Audit Your Performance

Once you’ve started posting content regularly on social media, you should begin to analyzing performance. See what sort of content works.

Find out the engagement on different forms of content as well. You should also figure out when your audience is the most active on social media so that you can schedule your posts for that time.

Audit your performance against that of your competitors as well compare their follower bases, engagement, Reach

Followers/Likes: Show the size of your social media audience

Reach: This shows how many people are seeing your media posts