Today businesses use social media to enhance their marketing efforts and to meet other objectives such as brand recognition, sales, increasing customer base, improving their customer service and increasing loyalty. However, the majority of companies activate social media campaigns without a clear strategy. According to new research, 72% of businesses don’t have a clear strategy for their social media platforms or they don’t have a clear set of goals. This translates into seven out of 10 businesses using social media without the knowledge to fully optimize each platform.
Having a clear goal and strategy is critical to the social marketing campaign. In addition, not managing your social media presence correctly can backfire and create serious backlash. Creating profiles on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Vine and only gaining fans or followers, is not a social media strategy.
In order to create a strategy, you have to start with questions such as:
- What platforms does my audience spend their most time?
- How do I gain their interest and attention?
- How do I measure success?
To create a good social media strategy take the following into consideration:
- Social platforms are continuously changing and evolving;
- Learn how each platform works and keep up with changes;
- Learn how metrics of reach platform work;
- Analyze other brands and successful marketing campaigns;
- Analyze your audience;
- Concentrate on engagement and humanization based on each platforms necessary method of marketing;
- Plan your strategy based on the specifics of each platforms unique proven approaches;
- Provide links to all the social media platforms on your website;
- Learn and understand search engine optimization;
- Make sure that your ads and the ability to buy your product is mobile-friendly;
- Use Google’s keyword tool to help you with selecting key words.
These are the areas that you’ll need to concentrate on before you can create a plan. Each social media platform will require its own strategy. Understanding where your customers are and how they’ve responded to successful campaigns will give you an idea on where to focus your marketing.
If you find that certain platforms aren’t aligned with your business, delete those accounts and focus your strategies on the platforms that are suitable to your business. Social media marketing continues to change and you will have to re-evaluate your strategy by using the metrics and conversion rates for each of your campaigns. Nothing is set in stone: Social media marketing is still evolving and there will be new social media platforms and technologies associated with them.
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