How to create a Social media strategy

When getting started with developing your social media strategy you have to remember it takes a lot of time to get it set up, so don't worry if you haven't got it set up straight.

It's so easy just to post photos and videos and see how it goes now. But are you finding your not really getting the results you want?

Do you want to make more sales?

Do you want more exposure for your services? Or promoting your latest blog posts?

With a little planning, you can put together a social media strategy that targets your key audience!

So in order to do this we need go through a social media strategy checklist of things you need to do. The idea of a strategy can be daunting but if we break it down, into really small points it's actually quite easy to get your head around, so I've put together a list of 6 point checklist to get started with:

What are your most important goals and what do you want to achieve ?

These are the two very important questions that are the basis for your whole strategy and it helps you understand what you really want to. Spend some time and write a list of what goals you want to achieve and how you will achieve them.

Work out the best social media platform for you

By really understanding how you can utilise each social media platform it can give you different opportunities.

Here are the uses of each platform:

• Facebook - You can post everything from informational and statistical content, to a special offer or some light-hearted posts on Facebook.

• Instagram - This is the best place to sharing visual content and eye-catching images, so you can show off their products or services,

• Twitter - This is best for snappy, quick and to the point content.- so it’s the place for industry news and latest updates.

• LinkedIn - Is great for sharing any changes you are making in your business to adapt to a current trend, or to provide unique industry insights. So very business to business content mainly but is great place to grow your own network in your industry.

• Pinterest - Its a great place to share a lot of content and grow a community of users, it focuses on content and information not on personal posts which makes it different from all the other platforms.

• Tiktok - Can be used for business depending on your content type, as on TikTok its all video content, but mainly used by a young audience so you have to consider that in your strategy.

Set goals that you can track

So in step one you have worked out what goals you want to achieve, now its important to work out how to track them. A good idea is to create a worksheet of your own and write them down and write how you will track them. The good thing is all of the platforms you work with have analytic tools you can use and pretty straight forward to understand so you can see if your strategy is working.

Here are a few ideas of your goals you can track :

• Reach of your social media posts - Useful on Facebook

• How many followers have I grown by this month ? How many do I want to reach each month target ?

• Clicks to your website from social media can be tracked?

What content will you put on your channels?

This is so important, how are you going to keep your audience engaged, what types of content you want to promote and what do you want your audience to do. Start by:

• Make a list of content ideas that relates to your business

• Do research on what other people are posting

• Think about whether you will do images, video or animated posts

• Depending what channels your using, make sure you are adapting your content to suit e.g. Twitter has a character limit of 280 so your posts need to be very short and to the point.

Discover who your audiences is

Do some research on who your audiences. A way to do this is to:

• Look at your current followers: Identify age, demographic, sex, location.

• Social listen by looking at by looking at relevant keywords and hashtags and see who follows them

• Look at your competition as that will provide valuable insights too

• Find out what platforms your audience use by trying out this keyhole.co where you can do a trial and search hashtags and what platforms there popular on.

Finally analyse everything

It's so important to analyse your social media platforms so you can see how your posts are doing, if you need to change your strategy or make any changes to your content.

You will to need to look at the following:

• Your audience demographics - Making sure its reaching people in the right location

• The time of day and the amount of engagement you got on each post - This can tell you if your posts are getting posted at the right time of day that your audience sees. If your not sure what times to post download this helpful guide.

• Are people clicking through your link? If they aren’t maybe your call to action isn’t clear or the text isn’t interesting people, so worth revisiting.

• Is your following growing? If not why ? Maybe your interacting with your audience too little. Bu there are many reasons for this so its worth looking at your content, time of day and hashtags you might have used.
  

Each platform has their own analytical tool, which goes into more depth into all the stats you might be interested in, so its worth spending time getting used to them.