Social Media Strategy Components is a comprehensive social media strategy plan, covering the core components of your social media marketing campaign. It includes critical sections for defining and building you brand, interacting with customers, or just getting started and managing it all efficiently.
This report includes an outline of what a successful social media strategy is and how to utilize it. This includes the analysis of top social marketing platform’s (Facebook, Google+, and Twitter) as well as how these platforms are changing. It also includes the newest and most innovative ways to maneuver through social media and take some stress off of your employees.——–
Perform an audit of your current social media practices
What is a social media audit?
Perform an audit of your current social media practices
An audit is a detailed look at current social media practices. Digging into the numbers will provide a clear look at what’s working, what’s failing, and what to improve. This lays the groundwork for identifying your goals and the steps required to reach them. It’s also an important way to identify opportunities and challenges.
According to Social Media Examiner, only 42% of marketers were able to keep a measure of their social media marketing activities. But how can you get the most out of your social media program if you don’t know what’s working?
Your audit should include the following:
- A list of all owned platforms with handles and login information.
- A list of your most engaged followers
- Calculation of your engagement rate
- Content performance, recorded by asking the following questions:
- What type of content performs best? The worst?
- What time and/or day get the most engagement?
- What is your current post frequency?
Getting started on an audit can be a little overwhelming, so here are a few resources to help:
Social Media Strategy Audit Resources
Perform a competitive analysis
Once you’ve reviewed your own practices on social media, it’s time to look at competitors. This is a good way to see how you compare, and can also be helpful in identifying industry standards, trends, and threats. The first step is to identify which competitors you want to research. Pick 4-5 competitors, including brands that are bigger and smaller than yours.
For each competitor, ask yourself the following questions:
- How are your competitors using social media? Include a list of all platforms they are on, how active they are and what type of content they are sharing.
- How many followers do they have compared to you? And what is their engagement rate?
- How is their content performing? What types of content perform the best?
- How do they engage with their followers?
It is often difficult to see everything competitors do. Here are a couple tools to help with your research:
- Phlanx
- Spyfu
- Facebook Pages to Watch and Ad Insights features
- Coschedule template
Clearly Defined Goals
Before starting any marketing campaign, you need to clearly define your goals. Deciding on what you want to achieve at the beginning of a campaign makes it easier to measure and analyze your results.
Your social media campaign can have multiple goals, where each piece of your strategy serves a different objective. Each goal you select should be personalized for your business’ needs, but here are a few common ones most campaigns address:
• Increase Brand Awareness. If your business is relatively new (or new to social media), or if you need to distinguish your business from others in the same space, some part of your campaign should aim to increase brand awareness. If prospects and customers are unable to recognize your brand, your campaign will have little effect.
Incorporating a sharing aspect to your campaign is a great way to increase your brand awareness and online influence. To measure your brand’s social influence, benchmark key metrics, such as total number of likes or followers, total brand mentions/retweets, influencer brand mentions and site entrances or app downloads driven by social media.
• Drive More Website Traffic. I know what you’re thinking: Who doesn’t want more visits to their website or blog? It’s a natural goal for most marketing campaigns, but it also plays into your social presence. The more visitors your website receives, the more opportunities they have to share your site or content on social media and follow your accounts on their favorite networks.
To drive more traffic, direct users to a landing page on your site where they can take the next action. Use Google Analytics or your Web analytics platform of choice to benchmark key metrics like total Web visits, visits driven by social media, time on site and overall engagement of social users.
• Drive Visitor Loyalty. Do you want to increase your website visitor loyalty? Driving more website traffic is a short-term goal, but you can aim to increase the amount of time spent on your website and the frequency of return visits for the long term.
If visitor loyalty is one of your goals, consider a social media campaign that requires users to visit your website several times to enter or find information. To measure visitor loyalty, benchmark metrics like pages per session, average session duration and the percent of new sessions to your site.
• Improve Conversion Rates. If your business is well-known and already receives a lot of Web visitors, your campaign should focus on improving your website/app conversion rates. Whether your business considers a conversion a product purchase or an account sign-up or anything in between, you can align an aspect of your social media campaign with website conversions.
Consider campaigns that require users to fill out a form or sign up to get the benefit or value being offered — but remember to keep an eye on these conversions to see if you’re driving meaningful, long-term customers through your campaign. To measure your social media campaign’s impact on conversions, track metrics like total site entries, total conversions and assisted social conversions.
Define Your Brand Persona
If your brand was a celebrity, who would it be? How would it talk? What does it look like? What style visuals best represent its personality?
A brand persona serves as a living, breathing embodiment of a brand’s values. It will serve as a compass for your entire social strategy.
Every time you talk, write, design, post and engage with your audience on social media, you’re exercising your brand persona.
When helping clients define their brand persona, we conduct two separate exercises – one focused on voice and the other on visual identity. By running through a series of deliberate questions we’re able to identify the traits that elevate our clients’ brand personas enabling them to set their brand apart from their competitors.
Here are a few brands with notable social media personas worth exploring:
- Headspace – This meditation app is designed to reduce stress and increase joy, which is exactly what their brand persona conveys. Through the use of a bright color palette, inspirational quotes and charming characters their website and social channels embody their mission and values.
- Wendy’s – This fast food chain is well known for their clever, quick-witted and snarky online personality. Everything from their day-to-day social media content to their responses to followers is true to their brand persona.
Conclusion
Instagram users are most interested in what other Instagram users in their own circles share, rather than any other type of post. Instagram’s recent algorithm change has made it increasingly difficult to see all Instagram posts. This is particularly true for smaller brands and businesses without a committed audience.