Social Media may be highly effective for both attracting and retaining customers. However, if you want to see results, you’re going to need to post consistently.
If you want to streamline your efforts and ensure your posts are effective, you are going to need a Social Media strategy.
Putting together a Social Media strategy can be difficult, especially when you’re new to these platforms. Here, you’ll discover how to create an effective Social Media strategy for your local business.
Choose your goals
If you want your social media strategy to work, you need to tailor it to your goals. Of course, to do this you first need to understand what those goals are.
What is it you want to achieve from your social media channels? It could be that you want to attract more visitors to your website. Or you may want to focus on building up brand awareness. You likely have several goals you want to achieve. Write them down and make sure they are specific, measurable, and achievable.
Once you have your goals listed, you can move on to the next step…
Identify the best platform for your business
These days, there are a lot of different social media platforms you can join. Rather than sign up to all of them, you’ll want to focus on just one or two platforms to start with.
Look to see which platforms your ideal audience uses the most. This will give you a better idea of where to focus your efforts, and the types of posts you’ll need to create.
Social media marketing takes a lot of effort. Therefore, you want to ensure you aren’t wasting that effort by marketing on the wrong platforms.
Understand your audience
This may sound obvious, but if you want to create a social media strategy that works, you need to first understand your audience. This means researching everything about your target market.
Put together customer profiles that outline each type of customer your business is suited to. This will give you the best idea of the types of posts you’ll need to create.
Analyze your competition
If you want to know what works on social media, check out your competition. Spend time looking at their pages and the types of ads they produce. How much engagement do they get on their posts?
This is also a great way to capitalize on anything they get wrong. Anything you can do better than your competitors will ultimately provide great results.
Determine the type of posts to create
Which type of posts are you going to be creating? Will there be a post series, or a giveaway coming up? Plan out the posts you are going to make, and also how frequently you are going to post them.
Again, you can get some great ideas from your competitors here. Just remember not to copy their ideas! Use the type of posts they create for inspiration only. If you directly copy something it could land you in a lot of trouble.
Create Posts in Advance
One of the main downsides to social media for business is the frequency you need to post. Ideally, you’ll want to post each day. However, finding the time to create posts every single day can be difficult.
If you want to simplify your post creation, consider writing them in bulk. That way, most of the work will already be done, and you can schedule them to post automatically with a relevant tool.
Keep track of important metrics
Any good social media strategy includes tracking important metrics. This helps to show you what’s working and where you might need to make changes.
Measure post engagement and how many people navigate to your website from your social media platforms. The more metrics you analyze, the easier it will be to identify the types of posts to create for best results.
If you follow these steps, you’ll be able to create a social media strategy that works. Remember, it takes time to start seeing results from social media. You need to build up a presence on there, raising awareness of your brand. The more effort you put into your strategy, the more you will get back.