Strategies in Social Media Management
Effective social media management is imperative in marketing and operating just about any business in this day and age. In order to develop an effective social media strategy, one must consider all aspects of what defines a successful social media presence for your particular business. In this article, we will walk you through a six-step process that will explain how to optimize your social media strategy and give your business the social media advantage it deserves.
1. Set Your Social Marketing Goals
Businesses turn to social media for many purposes. The most important part of your social media strategy is defined by how you answer these questions: why do you want to be on social media and what is your endgame?
To answer, think about what your business wants to achieve from social media. What are your specific marketing goals? Some examples include:
Revenues - new leads, new customers and increased sales from existing customers
Increase brand awareness
Expand your brand’s audience - in new geographies, demographics and markets
Increase community engagement
Increase web traffic
Improve customer service
Gain customer feedback about your brand
In all likelihood, revenue growth is the primary driver of social media presence for most businesses. But determining exactly what you want from your social media presence in addition to revenue growth is critical prior to launching a social media strategy.
2. Examine Your Target Market
Next, you will want to understand your target audience. Who are your social media customers? Take a look at their profiles on different platforms and figure out their basic demographics - gender, age, industry, geography, background. What do they want that you have? This is your product or service - understand why they want or need your product or service and why you are uniquely suited to meet their needs. What platforms do they use most frequently? If you want to maximize your return on social media, we recommend establishing a presence on all the big social media platforms - LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter - along with others that may be industry-specific. Why and how does your target audience spend time on these platforms? To answer this last question, you’ll have to delve into the specifics on each of the different platforms they use.
3. Understand the Differences in Social Platforms
At this point, having established accounts across all the big social media platforms, you will likely find that your audience changes from one platform to another. LinkedIn’s user base is career-oriented and well-educated, making it much more focused on industry-specific and complex content. Instagram’s users are younger than other platforms, so posts should be tailored to millennials' and Gen Zs’ shorter attention spans, due to the vast amount of content they consume on a daily basis, and their appreciation for vivid and attention-grabbing content. Twitter only allows a certain number of characters per tweet, so your audience is looking for concise, straight-to-the-point posts occasionally associated with short videos or supportive images or graphics.
4. Establish Your Most Valued Metrics and Study Your Competition
Though each platform is uniquely different from the next, most platforms have an analytics dashboard that provides an overview of who is following you and how they interact with you. This gives business owners the ability to tailor content to specific user groups. This will also allow you to help determine what matters most by platform. Reach? Clicks? Do you value engagement more than anything else? It may be tough to figure out which metrics mean the most to you, but it all comes back to the ultimate goal of your business’s social media presence. This can be more easily ascertained by looking at your competition. Check out their social channels and pay attention to their content, their audience, their engagement - their strategy. To further understand your industry, your target market, and your potential customers, you must also understand your competition and how they strategize across social platforms. It may seem simple, but it can be useful to Google search your most valuable keywords, phrases, and industry terms to find your competition in order to see what they’re doing right (and wrong). It’s always easier to build your social media strategy after understanding what your competitors have done well and not-so-well across their social platforms.
5. Share Engaging, Thematic and Timely Content That Aligns With Your Brand
Now - what are you going to share? Your content is what will be noticed first across your social platforms, so you need to make it engaging. One key part of your strategy should be to keep your themes consistent. This could mean posting only vibrant, eye-popping content with a lightly fluctuating color scheme, or rotating between memes, product photos, and user generated content. You also need to think about what type of content you’ll be putting out. Photos? Videos? Text posts? This should align with your brand and what your target audience generally interacts with.
For example, what started as a small startup that identified and tracked sponsorships in sports has now evolved into a company with an enormous social following and contracts with thousands of properties throughout the world. SponsorUnited carefully posts content curated toward their target market, which consists largely of prospective sports properties and brands, including infographics displaying the most prominent brands in categories such as retail, eCommerce, or alcohol, along with the sponsorship assets they own across select properties. They also post trivia and questions that their followers can interact with, giving them an easy and fun opportunity for direct engagement. What you may notice is that their theme is consistent: they stick with dark colors surrounding their graphics that allow their messages and statistics to stand out. This brings their audiences’ attention straight to the text - exactly where they want it to be - in order to get viewers to notice and understand just how useful the product can be.
Another example is Happy Hounds Massage & Fitness, a business that helps dogs stay strong, resilient, and happy through all stages of their life through the comprehensive fitness and massage services they provide. Happy Hounds uses Instagram to post photos and videos of the dogs they take care of as well as relatable pets memes in order to appeal to their obviously pet-friendly audience. Instagram is a totally visual channel that allows users to easily keep up with content themes, so it’s not only aesthetically pleasing to be thematically uniform, but it allows for easier management of your content calendar.
“It’s not only aesthetically pleasing to be thematically uniform, but it allows for easier management of your content calendar. ”
Timeliness also needs to be a priority, as you must be aware of when your customers are most frequently interacting with content across social platforms. Below, you will find a heatmap (courtesy of Sprout Social) that displays their findings on Facebook engagement throughout the week:
Most other platforms are going to be similar in terms of engagement, so ensuring posts go up at heavy traffic times is necessary in order to successfully increase engagement. Being timely also means responding to your followers’ questions or posting feedback on social media as soon as possible, as followers typically expect a response within the first few hours of posting. Plus, if users reach out to your business over social media directly, it’s a great opportunity to showcase your customer service skills on a platform that may expose others to your business.
6. Assess and Fine-tune
Finally, after implementing your tailored social media strategy, you will need to assess your results and fine-tune your tactics. Social media can be an asset to your business, but you need a well conceived strategy to get the best return on your social media investment. Stick to your brand, strategize based on your goals, and focus on the big picture, because in the end, social media strategy is about helping build your business to where you want it to be.