Social media has become an integral part of modern culture, giving people the opportunity to connect, communicate, and share stories. In this article, we are going to discuss about creating an effective social media strategy.
Statista and DataReportal studies reveal that the majority of people own 8 social media accounts and spend about 2 hours a day on them. This presents a unique opportunity for businesses to reach audiences beyond geographical limits. Businesses can easily communicate and engage with their customers and prospects alike with social media.
With social media user bases and usage on the rise, it's an exciting time to explore social media for your business. It’s a powerful tool that can be the key to success and exponential growth. While it may seem obvious, the need to invest time and resources in social media can be overwhelming. If done poorly, it can do more harm than good to your business.
We all understand the importance of social media and use it on a daily basis, however we still struggle with what to do from a business perspective. Many people do not know where to start. Should I make a Facebook page and post daily? What about Tiktok or Pinterest? On which platforms should I set up?
Like any business endeavour, a proper strategy is crucial, and social media is no exception. Understanding what you want to accomplish will help you become a household name on social media rather than just another brand. A good social media strategy can also help you reach your goals faster and save you time and money. It enables you to approach social media in a more systematic and effective manner.
In the next few sections, we'll walk you through our 9-step framework to develop a successful social media strategy.
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With largely all businesses having presence on social media, merely being present online isn't enough anymore. Standing out from the competition and finding success involves a lot of work. But what does success in social media really mean?
Success in social media comes in many forms, and it is closely tied to how well we achieve our goals. Setting clear goals is the cornerstone of a solid social media strategy, and it allows us to evaluate our level of success within the platform.
Goals serve as a compass - giving us directions from which to make decisions and measure progress. Without goals, we cannot truly know whether the strategies we implemented had an impact or were effective. That's very important when it comes to developing an effective social media strategy.
Goal setting can be simplified with the use of simple frameworks like SMART goals and OKRs. SMART defines goals to be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound.
The OKR framework has two key components - Objectives and Key Results. Objectives identify where we want our business to be, while key results break down objectives into achievable and measurable milestones. A business trying to drive sales with social media can have the following OKRs:
Objective: Increase online sales by 50%
Key Results:
OKRs allow you to set goals that may seem ambitious, because it paves the way for extraordinary performance.
Social media has both its blessings and its curses. You may reach a large audience, but that doesn’t guarantee they’ll resonate with your message or your product. Reaching for the stars is great if you have unlimited budgets, but many people are working with limited budgets and resources.
Establishing a target audience helps narrow down a sea of people to just a few key segments makes it easier for us to tailor our content and messaging to address their specific needs.
Market research is critical to understanding the audiences behind the accounts. Current customers can also be sources of audience research for established businesses.
First of all, you need information about the demographics of your intended audience. At the very least, you should be able to define the age group, gender and income level your audience belongs to.
Additionally, you may want to consider their race, marital status, and occupation. Demographics segment an audience into groups that share common traits, allowing you to tailor your messaging to meet the needs of your subgroup.
It is also very important to know more about their backgrounds. Find out what they like as well as dislike. Learn what their goals and challenges are. Understand where they are in life and where they want to be.
Finally, it is important to understand how our product or brand can provide value to our audience given their demographics and background. Knowing this allows us to frame our brand in a way that plays on their interests and advances their aspirations, or offers them a solution to the challenges they are facing.
There are countless social networks out there, so how do you decide on which platform to focus on? While all platforms have a community-building aspect and present an opportunity to grow our brand, they serve different purposes to different people.
In the previous section, we talked about identifying our audience, using that information also translates into which accounts we should focus on. We can provide our audience with more value and engage with them more effectively if we use a platform that suits their demographics and interests. Below, we explore popular platforms and how they compare with each other.
Facebook is the biggest social network in the world and by far the most versatile of all the platform. You get a good mix of different age groups, though mainly millennials and boomers, to whom you can communicate. It’s one of the best platforms for promoting your business and sharing updates with your target audience.
Instagram, on the other hand, is an almost entirely mobile platform. Most of its users are under 30, making it one of the most popular platforms for staying up to date with what’s new and trending. You can find success if you’re able to maintain an aesthetically pleasing presentation of your photographs and visuals.
LinkedIn's primary demographic is older and more professional. It's the go-to platform for B2B and lead generation initiatives because its users are educated and have reasonable income levels.
Twitter is the place for short and quick interactions, and it’s a good place to start conversations. Bulk of its users are between 30 and 49 and are male. Twitter is perfect for businesses who don't have a visual gimmick, and are instead focused on their unique voices. Wendy's is capitalising on its unique voice to gain traction on Twitter.
Tiktok is mostly popular among Gen Z. It’s one of the fastest-growing platforms with heavy average usage. Making entertaining and engaging content is important for Tiktok. Organic content with low production value can equally succeed as long as it has the personality and entertainment value.
With all platforms, it’s important to provide value to your audience in addition to selling your brand, so that they have a reason to interact with you. Using the right platforms can help you reach the right audience and create a more meaningful connection with them.
Since social media is one of the most effective marketing initiatives for businesses, there is bound to be competition.
The value of competitive analysis lies in not only knowing what your competitors are doing, but in how you translate that data into actionable steps. Knowing what they're doing helps you determine what works and what doesn’t.
Essentially, you want to emulate their best practices and implement their winning strategies as much as you can. Whereas for things you know aren’t working, you can choose to avoid them or iterate on what you think could improve performance.
Competitor analysis can also help you identify opportunity gaps or areas they haven't entered. This gives you a competitive advantage by enabling you to start earlier and establish yourself in that area.
We need to start by identifying who our competitors are. After we know who they are, we can look at their overall strategy, along with which platforms they’re on and how they’re using them. We want to measure our performance against their results and stay competitive, if possible, and strive to outperform them on key metrics like followers, reach, and engagement.
Besides the usual notes on competitors, it is great to add social media listening to our arsenal. Social media listening allows us to monitor what’s happening online by tracking discussions and mentions of certain keywords. This helps us understand what the general public thinks about our industry, our brand, and our competitors.
Social media listening can be a tedious process, but luckily there are tools to help automate it. Here are a few great options for social listening.
Keyhole allows you to keep tabs on competition by tracking competitor profiles, influencer profiles, and relevant keywords and hashtags. This allows you to compare your campaigns against those of your competitors. The tactical data it provides enables you to quickly address concerns and opportunities while also pivoting strategy for better results. Basic plans are available for $44/month.
Awario provides keyword mentions based on reliable, independent third-party data, backed up by internal crawling of web pages to give you real-time insights on the keywords. You get instant information on mentions of industry and brand related keywords from the biggest social platforms along with forums, blogs, and news articles for as low as $24/month.
Mention notifies you of any keywords and provides an advanced query builder that allows you to filter for more relevant keywords. You can monitor certain sources and track keywords relevant to your brand and industry starting from 25$/month.
Conducting an audit is essential to establishing a successful social media strategy. It gives you a snapshot of your accounts and establishes a baseline for comparisons. This prevents us from repeating ineffective strategies, reveals what works, and allows us to improve what we're doing.
Prior to conducting an audit, we want to determine metrics that are consistent with the goals we have set. A brand that is looking to increase sales should track how many sales it generated on social media, and which tactics and strategies contributed to it.
For example, once it’s determined that a strategy like posting reviews has proven to be effective in increasing sales, it can be adopted in future strategies. Those that fail to meet performance standards can be avoided so as not to waste time and effort.
Posts and content are the core building blocks of a social media strategy, regardless of the overall goal. Great content will advance a company's goals, so they should be reviewed on a regular basis.
Here are 3 easy steps to help with your social media audit:
Covering a longer period of time allows us to assess performance more objectively by reducing the influence of external factors such as major events. If possible, you should consider performance over the course of six months.
Metrics should be tracked at the account level and for individual content. At the minimum, you should track the number of followers, likes, reach, shares and comments.
You should first examine account level results and note anything that stands out - unusually good or bad performance. Next, the results are broken down over individual content pieces. This helps you determine which elements are common among your best performers, whether it’s messaging, visuals, hashtags or other elements.
Keyword research is usually an SEO topic, but many people fail to realise that it also proves valuable in social media.
It provides us with insights into what our audience needs and what they want to know. Using them results in content that directly answers their needs or content that is consistent with their values.
Additionally, they provide us a glimpse of our audience's way of speaking. Using their terms to talk with them creates a more honest and personal discussion. It also makes them feel like we really know them.
In addition, keywords can also serve as a source of content ideas. Any time you run out of ideas, you can look into other keywords relevant to yours. With keyword research, you can determine growing trends based on search volume growth. With social media, it’s good to be in the loop and on-board what’s trending.
Google Keyword Planner is one of the most frequently used tools for keyword research. It's free and offers helpful keyword suggestions related to your root keyword. Besides that, they also show the keyword search volume and the amount advertisers are willing to pay to run their ads on a specific keyword.
Uber Suggest is another keyword tool. Its biggest advantage over keyword planner is that it shows you what’s ranking for that keyword on search engines and social analytics for that post. A post that has been shared on social media a lot can be added to your content bucket for inspiration. The monthly plan starts at $12 per month, and lifetime plans start from $120.
Researching hashtags is relevant for platforms such as Instagram and Twitter. People find Instagram content relevant to their interests by following hashtags. Tools like RiteTag offer hashtag suggestions based on real-time engagement. On the other hand, Twitter highlights trending hashtags on their platform. You can utilize this to stay on top of the most talked about topic for the day.
Constantly coming up with content can be confusing and draining. Some days ideas don’t come in, while others you cram out half baked ideas that clearly won’t work. Managing social media accounts is not easy, especially when you have to manage multiple accounts.
In these situations, creating a social content calendar is crucial. A content calendar lets you visualise your planned content on a daily basis over a period of time. You want to be able to know when the content will be published, the platform where it should be published, the visuals and the texts accompanying it.
A content calendar sounds complicated and difficult to maintain, but it helps you stay organised and saves you significant time.
By creating a content calendar, you maintain accountability for your content. It ensures consistency and prevents you from forgetting to post each day. Regular posting has the added benefit of better engagement with your audience as highlighted in various studies and Facebook’s learning videos.
Having your content planned gives you room to double-check your work and minimise errors. You can avoid posting the same content twice, misspelling words or publishing incorrect graphics. If errors do happen, you have plenty of time to fix them.
Content calendar templates are already likely included with any free plan of the most popular project management tools like Monday.com and ClickUp. In addition to online project management tools, templates in excel and google sheets are widely available. Hubspot, Hootsuite, and ContentCal all provide downloadable social content calendar templates that can be used immediately.
Free Downloadable Content Calendar Templates
1. Hubspot
https://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/33415/
the-social-media-publishing-schedule-every-marketer-needs-template.aspx
2. Hootsuite
https://www.hootsuite.com/resources/blog/social-media-content-calendar
3. Content Cal
https://www.contentcal.io/blog/content-calendar-template-2021/
Social media scheduling tools allow you to easily post and stay on top of all the comments and questions across multiple social media accounts without logging in to each one separately.
Additional capabilities include the ability to add team members, which simplifies collaboration and enhances workflow during content ideation, production, and approval.
Moreover, scheduling tools provide you with detailed statistics and performance reports on your social media accounts.
Buffer combines publishing, analytics and engagement tools in one platform. It allows you to collaborate with your team as you plan and schedule content for various platforms. Buffer also offers smart notifications to ensure you’re able to respond immediately to urgent comments without having to leave the platform. Buffer offers a free version with limited features; premium plans start at $15/month.
Publer is one of the more affordable platforms for scheduling content. Besides the usual scheduling features, there are also options for bulk uploading up to 500 posts at once using csv file. They also simplify your workflow by integrating directly with Canva, Google Drive, Unsplash, and others. Free plans are available, while paid plans start at $10/month for up to five social accounts.
Later.com provides the same scheduling features, while offering extra Instagram specific tools for generating hashtags, searching user generated content and basic graphic editing. It’s a feature rich scheduling tool that starts at $12.50/month.
It's great to create content, but what's the point if no one reads or engages with it! Content of others can easily overshadow yours, especially if you're just starting out. That’s why it’s crucial to establish ways to promote and distribute your content at the outset.
You can reach your audience in a number of ways, including having your friends and family share your content on their own accounts.
Sharing your content on other platforms and relevant communities is another great way to reach your audience. Facebook groups, Reddit, Quora and other discussion areas can be great places for promotion. One caveat, however, is that you should be giving back to the community, so as not to come off as spammy. Furthermore, sharing your expertise with the community helps build your reputation, which can carry over to your brand.
Finally, you should create content that encourages interaction and discussion. Asking questions and making use of call-to-actions are great ways to boost engagement online. As you share your content, it's also important to engage and interact with your audience. Making a small gesture of thanking them, liking their posts and responding to their comments goes a long way. It shows your appreciation and gives your brand a human touch.
If you happen to have your content on your website, adding social sharing buttons will inspire readers to share the post, assuming they find it valuable. Comments sections will also encourage interaction with your readers.
You can also spend money to promote and distribute your content to a much larger audience by utilising engagement ads and having influencers promote your posts.
KFC UK recorded an 18% engagement rate with one of its polls by leveraging the power of engagement ads. Meanwhile, Vivo, a smartphone brand in the Philippines, partnered with local content creators to promote its new line. It resulted to increase in unaided recall and purchase intent.
If you intend to spend valuable time and resources to create and execute a social media strategy, then it is only logical that you measure your performance on a regular ongoing basis.
Measuring performance allows you to constantly optimize your strategies to attain your goals faster. It translates your efforts into quantifiable measures, facilitating comparisons with internal targets.
Social media is a very competitive world, and there's really no room to slack off. Constant optimisation and fine-tuning of plans is the only way to stay ahead and succeed in the long term.
There are a lot of metrics available, but we want to highlight a few that we find most important.
Social media is a big part of building brand awareness and we can measure this by looking at both reach and impressions for our pages and individual content pieces. Impressions are a measure of how many times our content has been seen, while reach measures the number of people who have seen it.
Engagement should also be measured, because it lets us know how our content is perceived by our audience. It is measured by the number of shares, comments, reactions, and clicks our post receives. Our engagement rate indicates how likely it is that we are producing relevant and engaging content.
Getting a sense of our return on investment for social media marketing is also critical. Depending on the business model, conversions can come in the form of sales or leads. We can track this data from our website or with the use of analytics software like Google Analytics.
Social media is crucial to marketing and branding. It might have been invented as a way to connect people, but it has evolved into a powerful tool for marketers. It is now a part of every marketing strategy.
It’s not just about being present on these platforms; to get the most out of social media, you need a well thought out social media strategy. Businesses that craft effective social media strategies gain a significant advantage and increase their chances of success, regardless of what they intend to accomplish.
By following our 9 steps for crafting effective social media strategies, you can start dominating social media and reaching greater heights with your business.
Interested to hire a social media agency? Heroes of Digital is the top Singapore social media agency. With more than 600 clients under our belt and half a decade of experience, we are the go-to Singapore social media marketing agency.
Get your free social media marketing consultation with us today!
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