Today, Social Media is central to digital marketing for businesses. Did you know that the share of the budget spent on social media is forecast to increase by 21.5% in the coming years? Spaces for communication, interaction, and new customer acquisition, social networks have become important allies in developing your reputation and visibility online.
Would you like to develop a tailor-made Social Media Strategy to optimize your reputation and digital presence? Here are 6 steps to build a solid and effective strategy to achieve your goals!
To establish your Social Media Strategy, you can start by identifying what your goals are. Here are a few examples:
step1: Identify your goals
As in traditional marketing, your social media strategy starts with clarifying your goals. Then you will identify who you are talking to and how to reach your audience. It is therefore by starting a market study that we propose to begin your strategy!
- Improving your brand awareness
- Increasing the number of subscribers
- Increasing interactions
- Reaching more people
- Increasing traffic to your page and site
- Converting new customers
- Increasing sales
- Building customer loyalty
Your business goals are the pillar of your strategy and should guide your thinking and content development.
step 2: Choose your target audience
The second step in your preliminary analysis is to know your audience. Depending on your business goals, you can reach potential customers, companies or partners. Social networks include a wide variety of profiles which can be distinguished by:
- Socio-Professional Category
- Age
- Gender
- Location
- Interests and preferences
- Personality
- Online behavior
- Frequented platforms
- Goals and challenges/frustrations
To help you classify the different profiles of your target, we suggest that you create persona files. These will help you identify the typical profiles of your customers and prospects in order to adjust your social media marketing strategy. Knowing your target is the key to reaching it better!
step 3: Understand the different platforms and their audiences
Now that you have identified your objectives and you know your target, it is time to know on which networks you will communicate and reach your target customers!
- Facebook: the most frequented network with 2.7 billion users, mainly used to inform, entertain and reinforce its brand image.
- Instagram: Has 1 billion followers and is used more to inspire, share artistic content and promote products.
- LinkedIn: This network brings together 575 million users and connects companies and professionals, recruiting and sharing news and current information.
- Pinterest: With 440 million users, this network is meant to inspire, share ideas and promote products.
- YouTube: bringing together 2 billion users, it is the basic network for video content intended to inform, entertain or educate.
- Twitter: The network has 350 million subscribers and is used to communicate news, share opinions and interact with customers.
- Snapchat: with 315 million users, this network is mainly used by young people and is intended to entertain, promote products and develop its brand image.
- TikTok: This entertainment and engagement network brings together 800 million users and also helps increase brand awareness.
To target the networks that will be most relevant to your marketing, you can assess their distribution by age, gender, average time of use, intentions, and other data specific to your audience!
Tip: to better choose your platforms, also consider analyzing where your competitors are active! You can also conduct a survey of your current customers to find out their favorite networks.
step 4: Plan your social media content strategy
Your market analysis and choice of networks made, time to plan your content!
First of all, if you already have a business account on the chosen platforms, consider optimizing your profile. You can then perform a comprehensive audit of your content’s performance, delivery, and engagement it has generated so far. This way, you can identify the strengths and weaknesses of your current content strategy and adapt it based on your results.
Then you can develop your social media communication strategy. The question you must answer at this point: what to say and how to approach it?
To create an effective editorial and graphic charter, start by identifying your company’s values and mission. These are the ones you will put forward directly or indirectly in your communication.
Remember that your Social Media Strategy is also intended to ensure your brand awareness and create a positive brand image. And what takes precedence on the platforms, as much for its users as for the algorithms, will be:
- Quality: the creation of quality content goes as much through texts and visuals as through shared information
- Originality: unique content that stands out from the rest will have a much better chance of attracting attention than trivial, duplicate or unoriginal content
- Relevance: your publications must communicate something concrete and topical for your Internet users and for your brand
- Engagement: content that elicits reactions will have much more visibility on networks and ensure direct communication with your audience
- The frequency of publication: regularly published content is favored by all platforms and will have more visibility with your subscribers!
To build a concrete content strategy on social networks, we recommend identifying, according to your values and missions, the different themes to be addressed on each platform. Remember, the point is to generate interaction. Create tailor-made content for your audience!
step 5: Optimize your presence and the distribution of your messages
To ensure good visibility for your business on social networks and increase the engagement rate, consider adapting the type of communication to the platform. To do this, you need to know their codes, including:
- Best practices: editorial style and tone, presence, and density of emojis, text length, format, graphic charter, community management.
- The day and time of publication: according to the algorithms of each platform, and your own statistics!
- The type of content: depending on your objectives and the message to be shared, you can choose between image, video, GIF, article, story, informative/educational/humorous content, news, opinion, etc.
- Community Management: Interacting with your customers via their comments, chat, or even the rebroadcast of their publication will be beneficial for your brand image, and your rating on networks and will give a human and accessible approach to your business.
Creative vs sponsored content: what are the differences in your performance?
Is it essential or optional to put a budget on social networks in 2021? To ensure an interesting reach of your posts, the use of boosts and advertisements is becoming more and more necessary. These allow you to target specific audiences and distribute your publications or campaigns more widely. This way, you ensure that your post reaches more people, and therefore generates more engagement! In addition, you get more value from the time spent creating your posts. Once you know the boosts and how to advertise on Facebook, you can therefore optimize the distribution of your content on social networks.
step 6: Analyze your results
Finally, any good Social Media Strategy requires a thorough analysis of your performance! Even by following the best recommended practices, it will be the analysis of your results that will allow you to create a successful strategy, adapted to your reality and audience.
By exploring the statistics of each platform, evaluate as a priority the engagement generated by your publications, including:
- Mentions
- Comments (length and nature)
- Shares
- Video views (length in seconds)
- CTR (Click Through Rate) or call-to-action button
- Messages received privately as a result of a post
Depending on your results, you can analyze the strengths and weaknesses of your strategy and content. Cultivate your strengths and try to identify the cause of errors to create content that is more engaging, creative, and adapted to your audience! Finally, to optimize your Social Media Strategy, explore the management and planning tools best suited to your needs.
Adopt best practices by benefiting from expert advice!
Now that you know the basics of a good strategy for your corporate networks, let your creativity run wild! With the right resources in hand, you will need to trial and error and analyze your results closely to adapt your strategy over time and achieve your goals.
Would you like to develop your skills as a social media manager and learn about the industry’s best practices? Book a free consultation with me today and discover several tips and tricks to optimize your visibility on the platforms and better achieve your goals! Contact me to benefit from personalized advice!
