Is social media working for your business?

If you have started the new year with a plan to make social media more effective for your business, the first thing you need to put in place is a social media strategy.

If you have one already, then well done you’re all set! If not, this guide will help you get started.

Getting Started

Social media isn’t a magic formula. What works for one business may not work for another. So it is important to have a strategy in place for your business to ensure the following:

Your objective is identified – to measure success.
You post consistently – to maintain and grow brand awareness.
You post quality content – to add value for your customers/potential customers.

Here are my 8 top tips to get started with a social media strategy.

1. Identify your social media objectives

Blackboard with lightbulb and lines linked to blank circles

Your social media objectives should be linked to helping you achieve your business goals. For example, if you’re a new business just starting out, your focus should be on creating brand awareness. However if you’re a well established business with good engagement in place, you can focus on driving traffic to your website. Whatever it may be, start with your business goals, to determine how social media can help achieve them.

2. Understand your target audience

It is key to know who your audience are, so that you can create and share content they will enjoy. User personas can be very useful to really focus on what makes your ideal customer tick, so you can really understand their needs, wants and pain points.

It can help to think about some of the following to really drill down your personas to inform your business decisions and social media plans:

Age
Gender
Family
Location

Personality
Interests
Motivations
Inspirations

Job
Routines
Social media platforms
When they are online

3. Review of Competitors

Reviewing your competition can help you learn what they are doing that works well, and not so well. If you have seen they are using a certain strategy which isn’t yielding great results, it is probably one to avoid.

However if they are having a lot of success, be it with use of video, competitions, or something else, it may be worth trying some of their tactics.

4. Audit Your Platforms

If you’re already up and running, you can learn a huge amount by reviewing your current social media activity.

Review a few weeks of posts to look at the type of content you’re sharing, how frequently you are posting, what engagement you are getting and your analytics to determine what is working for you. This can help identify areas for improvement.

5. Establish Your Brand Content Mix

Consistency is key within social media so it’s helpful to think about what content segments your business will post about. If you think of your business as a pie chart, it helps to identify 5 or 6 subjects you want to talk about. You can then work out how much of a percentage they should represent.

As a general rule, there should be an 80/20 mix of useful versus sales focused posts. So ensure 80% of your content is educational/informative/entertaining and only 20% is focused on selling.

6. Identify & Engage with Influencers

Influencers have the potential to get your content infront of a wider audience and influence them into taking action.

You can find them organically in the following ways:

Look at who your target customers are following.
Search for top industry bloggers.
Monitor who platforms suggest you follow.
Review who your competitors are following.
Look at public Twitter lists.

There are also various paid tools you can use such as Right Relevance and BuzzSumo.

7. Engage with Your Audience

The key word in social media is SOCIAL. Engagement is really helps organic reach with the algorithms, so make sure you are creating conversations and talking to your customers/followers/ potential followers.

It is also important to respond to comments from your customers in a timely manner, as well as commenting on others posts too.

8. Test, Measure & Refine

The final step is testing. Try new things, measure what works well and not so well, and then refine your content based on findings.

The Insights section on platforms is key to help with this as it lets you see how posts have performed.

A strategy is not a one-off but will require refining over time to ensure it is always working for you.

I hope that helps you get started! If you need help getting to grips with anything outlined in the blog, creation of a strategy, or audit of your social media platforms then just get in touch.