A social media strategy helps you create your goals, the methods to achieve those goals, and setting up metrics to monitor them. A good social media plan consists of goal settings, analysis of current social media platforms and content, and future strategy planning and implementation.
Every social media channel is different and your overall social media strategy would require a few deviations to incorporate your social media plan across platforms.
Steps to plan for Social media marketing
Step 1 – Goal settings
The first step in creating a social media plan is to set up your goals. Your goals have to be in line with your overall business goals. For example, if your business goals for the year are to increase sales your social media goals would be to increase reach and improve conversion rates. Goal setting is important to measure the success and ROI of your social media plan.
Step 2 – Audience Persona
Knowing your audience persona helps you understand who your customers are and where they exist. This can help you plan your content according to the customer’s interests and the platform that they are present on. It also helps in defining your brand voice and gives insights into how your message should be so that it reaches your target audience at the right time, the right place, and with the right message. When creating an audience persona it’s key to look at the data and not make an assumption on who or what your audience is.
You should know characteristics like:
• Age
• Gender
• Location
• Income
• Purchase Patterns
• Likes/Dislikes
Step 3 – Competitor Analysis
Competitor analysis helps you to deep dive into what your competitors are doing on social. What type of content they are posting, their engagement rate, and customer response to their social media activities. In competitor analysis, you can identify gaps in your own social media plan in comparison to your competitors and also find out where you are outperforming your competition. It also helps to draw in any similarities and differences between you and your competitors on your social media platforms.
Step 4 – Social Media audit
Conduct a social media audit on all your social media platforms this will help you understand what type of content is yielding good results, What is your engagement rate, and who is engaging with your account. You can also identify the strategy you have been using and how it compares to your competitors. While conducting a social media audit you have to understand how customers are responding to you on different platforms and what measures can be taken to increase your visibility and engagement on these platforms.
Step 5 – Optimize your social media accounts
The next step would be to optimize your social media accounts this can be done by creating bios, writing descriptions about your business, using the accurate image size for your social media logos, cover pictures, and posts, following the recommended hashtag uses for platforms and finding the best time to post on each platform.
Step 6 – Create a content calendar.
Creating a calendar helps you track, plan and prepare all your content. It’s always good to have your content organized and accessible all in one place. Creating a content calendar helps in preparing and sending out posts out on time. It also makes it easy to understand what content is being posted at any given time and where. A content calendar helps you in staying consistent and helps you to maintain your posting schedule. While creating a content calendar your content should have the right mix, not all posts have to be about generating leads. Your content should be a blend of promotions, information, and education.
Step 7 – Evaluate your strategy
Evaluate your strategy to measure its performance against your goals. KPIs are easy to evaluate how your social media strategy is performing. Optimize and tweak your strategy where ever necessary and make reports of where your social media plan is performing better than expected and where it’s underperforming and measure taken to improve performance.
