It’s expected that the number of social media users globally will be 3.96 billion, a 4.8% increase from one year ago. This makes social media a hot marketing hub for small and large businesses. A social media marketing strategy summarizes your marketing actions and objectives and how you’ll achieve them.

An effective social media strategy enhances your branding and increases customer loyalty, conversion rates, and inbound traffic. It’s also a way to gain real-time, valuable insights into customer behaviors and interests to create a suitable marketing plan. This article outlines nine tips for building a successful social media strategy.

1. Pick the right channels

Linking your social media strategy to your channels is essential when choosing the right platforms. If you cannot explain how and why a specific channel can help you meet your objectives, then you shouldn’t adopt it. If you want to increase brand awareness, pick properly established channels with a vast audience because this will help you target a wider range of potential customers.

It would be worth considering niche and popular platforms, especially if you know your personas. Paid promotions are an effective way to increase brand awareness while extending reach. Research and compare the available social media advertising alternatives, such as this Twitter vs. Facebook ads guide, to determine the ones that can help you better achieve your goals.

2. Find your social media target audience

Your social media target audience is the group you wish to appeal to, depending on demographics like job title, age, education, income level, behavior, or location. It consists of people who are likely to be interested in your business. Identifying your audience is crucial to ensure you speak the same language.

This makes it easier to develop brand loyalty, interact on social media, and eventually buy. To find your target audience on social media, create buyer personas, determine where your audience is most active, research your competitors, and survey your existing customers.

3. Set your goals

Social media goals are statements about what you intend to achieve with specific social media tactics or the entire social media strategy. Great social media objectives should align with broader business goals. These goals offer you a target to work towards while helping manage your budget, streamline and structure your workflow, align your social media activities with the business’s broader objectives, and prove your marketing ROI. Your social media goals may include some or all of the following:

• Increasing brand awareness
• Managing brand reputation
• Increasing website traffic
• Improving community engagement
• Boosting sales or conversions
• Generating leads
• Delivering customer service
• Gaining market insights via social listening
• Attracting candidates for open positions
• Increasing engagement

When setting social media goals, ensure they’re specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound.

4. Conduct social media competitor analysis

Competitor analysis is a crucial step when building a social media strategy. Listing your competitors on the various social media channels broadens your perspective regarding your domain while helping you spot the brand that’s making the most out of these platforms because a channel that works for your competitors will likely work for your business too.

While every brand has content creation guidelines and tone, competitor analysis can help you determine the kind of content that works and how to communicate with your audience. There are many brands offering products or services similar to yours. Looking at their posts likes, comments, and shares, you can understand how their audience interacts with their brand. Before you begin preparing your social media strategy, ask yourself:

• Why should customers buy from you?
• What makes you different from your competitors?
• How can your products or services benefit customers?

The responses to these queries will be a crucial selling point.

5. Develop promotion strategies for every channel

Different social media platforms have varying best practices you must consider if they’re part of your social media strategy. Consider adhering to the social media guidelines for each social media platform, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, Snapchat, and others you want to include in your campaign. This makes it easy to maximize your efforts by utilizing every platform to your advantage.

Some social platforms have unique characteristics that enable you to publish different content types to engage your audience. For instance, Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook have a video Livestream feature that lets you connect with your audience in real time.

6. Create engaging content

Your content should constantly be engaging, whether a social ad or promotional post. Quality is paramount for any social media content strategy. Let your content promote your brand’s personality. Leverage Snapchat and Instagram’s visual nature to attract your audience’s attention.

Nonetheless, the content should contain user-generated hashtags and content to promote your business while building a community. Since social media allows you to post multiple types of content, consider varying what you post to provide your audience with content they’ll enjoy, including photos, memes, podcasts, videos, and more.

7. Develop a content calendar

Upon determining your social media strategy’s goal and how your content will be promoted across platforms, develop a social media content calendar. It acts as a guideline for what your company plans on sharing and promoting across all the social networks. A well-planned and structured social media calendar can help you denote your posting cadences and content themes to suit every platform’s objective and audience.

These calendars allow you to concentrate on your long-term strategy. An effective social calendar should contain a title or topic, type of content, description, author, post date, promotion details, due date, and others.

8. Track your social media metrics

Your social media objectives determine your metrics, and for each goal you set, you’ll require a related metric to help you determine your social strategy’s success. Social media metrics help you know how well your plan performs and how it’ll impact your overall business. You can use a social media analytics tool to track metrics like conversions, referrals, impressions, reach, likes, comments, engagement rate, account mentions, and more. The metrics to track might vary depending on your social platforms.

9.  Adjust your strategy

Social media takes time before bringing in tangible results. Using the results from your social media metrics tracking, you can determine what is working and what isn’t to adjust your social media plan accordingly.

Endnote

Social media advertising is an excellent way to promote your business. Use these tips to build a successful social media strategy.