Yes, You Need a Social Media Strategy

Yes, You Need a Social Media Strategy

These days, businesses fall into four categories when it comes to social media marketing:

1. No social media presence whatsoever,
2. Random social media posting on underdeveloped channels,
3. Trying to engage on social media but not gaining traction, or
4. Executing a well-developed social media strategy.

If your enterprise falls into one of the first three categories, you need to create and execute a thoroughly-researched social media strategy. The time of opting out of social media is long gone. Consumers across verticals expect businesses to have active presences on the appropriate social media channels.

Platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, and YouTube receive multiple daily visits from users, meaning your company has thousands of opportunities to engage with your target audience. If you aren’t taking advantage of these chances with potential shoppers, your competitors will,   and their business will thrive while yours struggles.

Begin with Your Goals

To start developing your social media marketing strategy, you have to establish what you want to achieve. You might want to drive more traffic to your website. Maybe you want to establish your business as an industry expert. Possibly you want to build reviews of your company on social channels. Defining your goals allows you to better plan how to build your social media persona.

Additionally, clearly defining goals allows you to decide how you will measure the efficacy of your social media strategy. If you want to use social media to increase sales, makes sales from Facebook, Pinterest, etc. the key performance indicators you track with an analytics program.

Look at Your Competitors

Take a cue from the competitors in your industry with social media presences. What are they doing right? What do you think they could improve? What do their followers engage with the most? Learn from others to shape a successful social media strategy for your company.

Understand Your Audience

Executing a social media strategy that achieves the goals you’ve outlined means understanding whom you are trying to connect with on the various channels. Create or revisit your ideal buyer personas to pinpoint the type of content your target users crave as well finding out what social channels they engage with regularly.

Build Profiles Completely

Once you have selected the social media channels where you are going to focus your efforts, build your company’s profiles there completely. Provide all of the information requested with high-quality images for profile and cover pictures. If you already have social media profiles set up, make sure they are up-to-date and filled out entirely.

Create Clickable Content

While it’s important to curate content from other sources to share on your social media channels, most of what you want to post should be owned content that your business creates. This includes everything from blog posts to videos. Outline a plan that details who will produce what pieces of content when and a schedule for publishing these pieces on your channels. Don’t forget to repurpose existing content to use on your social profiles.

Measure and Tweak

As you execute your social media strategy, track your efforts to see what is working and what needs improvement. Not two companies are the same, so what is achieving goals for one enterprise might not for another. Learn from your social media performance and tweak your content and efforts moving forward.

Be Patient

One of the biggest mistakes a business can make when executing a social media strategy is expecting immediate results. It takes time to cultivate a worthwhile social media presence that generates leads and drives website traffic. Even if you invest in paid promotion on social media channels, real results take time. Don’t get dissuaded by low-performance numbers at the beginning. These metrics will improve as you stick with your social media strategy and make adjustments as necessary.

Work with Social Media Experts

Developing an impactful social media strategy requires a keen understanding of the landscape along with a track record in developing outstanding content. Many businesses do not have the budget or staff necessary to fulfill the requirements of developing and executing a social media strategy. That’s why organizations turn to Alt Creative. Our team has years of experience in social media marketing, working with a variety of businesses. Put our employees to work for your company. Contact us today.