Doing social media is an art and you have to make a comprehensive strategy to stay on top all the time. But, it’s something small business owners don’t consider too often. And this is why they don’t get the best out of their social media profiles.
If you’re one of those, follow these guidelines to create a successful social media strategy for your brand.
- Define Your Goals
Before you go about making a strategy, you should know your own potential and things that will be more beneficial for you in future. Here is a list of goals for successful strategy.
- Increased brand awareness
- Personalizing or humanizing a brand
- Connecting to customers
- Improving customer experience
- Searching and accessing influencers
- Increasing authority
- Showing leadership
- Building a strong network
- Improving reputation
- Improving conversion rate
Any of these items can be your goal. Even none of them was your choice, you should have a clear goal in your mind; otherwise you will end up consuming your time and money and remain under achieved.
- Analyze Your Competitors
Second best thing you should do to devise a flawless social media strategy is to analyze your competitors and market leaders. It’s beyond watching what successful brands are doing. You need to focus on how your competitors are getting such attention and what tools they deployed to gain that attention. Observe their activities on their profiles, number of fans, type of content. You can use this information to start your social media strategy.
- Identify Your Audience
Understand your target audience, their requirements and preferences. You can know your audiences with the help of following tools:
- Google Analytics
- Social Media Analytics available on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and other networks
- Customer service portal
- Carefully Choose Your Handle
Social media handle is no longer an option, it has become an important part of your business. To find out whether or not you can get the handle for your brand, visit Knowem where you can type the username and search the list of available handlers.
After finding your handler, verify it with Knowem again just to ensure your audience don’t get confused. You can have multiple handlers if there are more than one person posting in a group. In this case, you need to set up a dashboard where you can monitor the performance of your team.
- Choose The Best Network
Don’t think Facebook and Twitter are the only networks where you can get potential audience from. In fact, it’s not certain where your audience is in alacrity. You need to search your audience on many different platforms before finalizing one particular networks for social media campaign. On the basis of the platform, you have to decide what kind of content you should post to attract audience.
- Create A Sound Social Profile
After choosing your network, or networks, you need to create a strong profile and link your accounts with each other. Make sure, the cover pages on each profile is identical across all social networks.
- Set Guidelines
If it’s your SEO service Toronto that also maintains your social media profile, you need to give them a set of instructions to handle your social media activities. The guideline may include the following:
- Brand mentions
- Tone and voice
- Topics to cover
- Topics to avoid
- Current information and its nature
- Decide What To Post
It depends on the nature of your brand and the audience you’re targeting. However, there are five most popular content formats with highest number of shares:
- Photos
- Opinions
- Links to articles
- Status updates
- Personal recommendations
Since possibilities are endless, you can always take an easy route with visual content, as images with little text are most popular content format.
- Curate Web Content
There’s no need to create your own content, curation is the best option to promote your brand. At the same time, you need to make sure, the curated content must not offend anyone among your audience. You can use content from your customers and get a bit of relief. If the content is curated, make sure you add context to it.
- Streamline Your Content
Your content should meet your objectives. Optimized content is easy-to-find and search engines also like it. Pay attention to the length of content. For example – don’t go beyond 140 characters while tweeting. In this length, you have to include your handler and url as well. If the tweet is about your blog post, you need to pay attention to the headline and images as well.
Conclusion
Keep on reviewing and tweaking your profile and improve it in the lights of customer’s preferences. Be regular on all platforms where you have your audience and make sure to listen to them. This is what makes your social media strategy more successful.
Source: http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/15072-social-media-framework.html