Is your social media strategy still current? We can all agree that much has happened this year. A lot of businesses are struggling to keep afloat as the pandemic rages on. But if we were to look for a silver lining, there is still an upside to all this. The digital economy is booming. This means that, for most businesses to be able to compete in the market, it must have a strong online presence. Now, more than ever, you have to have a strong social media strategy.
But succeeding isn’t as simple as just having an online presence and gathering a following. Part of a strong social media marketing plan should include choosing the right channels, sharing relevant content, and everything in between.
Ensure that your social media strategy is updated.
Here’s a checklist of what to include in your comprehensive and up-to-date social media plan to help you optimise your business’ online presence and branding strategy.
🗹 Goals
This calls for evaluation and realignment. What is it that you want to accomplish? What are your business goals? Do you want to generate leads and sales? Are you after increasing brand awareness or growing your audience? Do you want to be more visible in the community and increase engagement? Are you looking to generate and increase your web traffic? Make your objectives clear and start with the end goal in mind as you draft your social media marketing plan.
🗹 Target Audience
Knowing your audience is half the battle. So much information about consumer behaviour is available out in the open. A lot of social media tools already come with their own analytics, to make it easier for businesses to learn about their target audience or even to explore demographics that aren’t on their radar. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Youtube all come with their own analytics toolkits. You can also explore 3rd party analytics tools like HootSuite, Sprout Social, Google Analytics, Tailwind, Social Report, and Zoho Social. Use these tools to learn about your target audience’s behaviour.
🗹 Metrics
Goals should be measurable. Otherwise, you won’t be able to track how you’re doing. This is why it is important to have metrics, something to help you determine if you’re hitting the mark or not. Depending on the goals you have set for your business, you can keep an eye out on the following metrics:
- Engagement: measured through likes, comments, shares, clicks, retweets, post engagement rates, or mentions.
- Awareness: measured through impressions & reach. Good to track especially if one of your business goals is to increase perception and brand awareness.
- Share of voice: measured through volume and sentiment, this is often used in public relations.
- ROI: measured through referrals & conversions, this should always be included in your metrics especially if you are an income generating business.
- Customer care: measured in response rate & time, these metrics are customer facing. You would do well to track this if you are interested in improving customer experience.
🗹 Competitor Analysis
Yours isn’t the only business around. However, the market is big enough to accommodate all players. It wouldn’t hurt to see how your competitors are doing and how much market share they’re getting. The goal is not to copy their content but to determine the best practices so that you can adapt them to your own social media strategy. This is an opportunity to develop a unique branding strategy to set yourself apart from the rest.
🗹 Content
This is the most important component of your social media strategy. Most of your time will be directed towards creating or curating valuable content. Your execution is what will help you achieve your business goals. Make sure to develop engaging content. Be consistent and stick to a theme. This will make it easier to develop unique content or to curate existing ones. Take advantage of the different social media tools to create engaging content. And keep switching it up. Use beautiful or informative images or even explore videos as this is all the rage right now.
By now you should have all the pieces you need to draft a comprehensive social media marketing plan. Adapt a dynamic approach. This means that you have to constantly refine and recalibrate your social media strategy. Most of this will be trial and error, but if you make your analytics work for you, you will just have to tweak your strategy instead of revamping or recreating the whole thing from scratch. Hopefully this checklist inspires your new and improved social media marketing strategy. Happy planning!
