Social media is a great way to connect with customers, build a legion loyal supporters and enhance your company’s reputation. Doing social media well requires both time and money. Having a solid strategy will help determine where to focus your energies that will lead to opportunities to reach a bigger audience, increase sales of your product or services, and drive more traffic to your site. Here are four steps to help you get the most out of your social media investment.
Set Goals
The first and most important step is to define your goals. These should be tied to your business strategy. Without goals, it will be difficult to determine what kind of content to create and who you want to communicate with. It will leave your social media channels looking disorganized and unfocused. Similar to setting business goals, your social media goals should be practical and achievable.
Examples of goals include:
Increase awareness about your brand (Followers)
Increase sales of your product or services
Improve the reputation of your brand
Define Your Audience
The second most important part of a social media strategy is identifying your key audiences. Create a list of the groups of people and organizations you’d like to interact with and build a relationship with. Sort your audience based on demographics, location, and interests. To build a strong connection with your primary audience group, try to find out what type of content they consume most often and what platforms they use.
Choose the right social media platforms
Go where your audience lives. Once you have defined your audience, you will have to choose the platforms to reach them. To do this, you’ll need to know which platforms your audience uses most. It’s common to want to be on all platforms. But to get the most out of your investment, try focusing on the top 1-2 social media platforms used by your audience. For example, if your business is a B2B model, you will want to be on LinkedIn and Twitter.
The key to building strong relationships with your followers is to engage with them. Share original content, reshare or retweet relevant information, and respond to questions.
Measure Your Performance
Building a social media presence takes time and discipline. Once you started posting regularly, you should start analyzing your performance to identify opportunities for improvement. Many of the social media platforms have native analytics tools that provide you with all the information you need to measure your performance. Making this a part of your social media strategy will allow you to identify the best time to push content out to your audience, as well as, the type of media (video, infographic, images, animations, etc.) that works best.
Common metrics include:
Impressions (Reach)
Shares/Likes/Retweets (Engagement)
Link clicks (Conversions)