Your Recipe For A Successful Social Media Strategy
Many companies have a presence on one or more social media channels, and all attempt to draw attention to their brand. Having heard of the remarkable power of social media, they’d be crazy not to, right?
However, of course, the degree of success these companies enjoy varies widely.
Mostly, that comes down to strategy.
A well-designed, robust social media strategy is bound to be more successful than a haphazard or Ad Hoc approach.
The question then, becomes how to create such a strategy to maximize your return on every dollar spent.
Below, you’ll find our six-ingredient “recipe” for social media success:
Make it Highly Relevant
This refers specifically to the content you choose to post via your social media channels.
The content you create or curate for your fans and followers needs to be relevant to the business you are in, or It is not going to help you meet your goals.
If you sell smartphone peripherals, then posting links to cute cat videos on Youtube may get you some laughs and a lot of appreciative comments, but it is not going to help you sell so much as a single product.
That is an extreme example, of course, but it helps to underscore the point. Good content is relevant to your business and the goals you’ve laid out for yourself.
Keep It profoundly Targeted
Before you build a page and establish a presence on any social media platform, you need to deeply and thoroughly understand your target market.
Who are they? What age group do they primarily fall into? What social media channels are they most likely to use? What times of day are they most likely to be online?
The answers to these questions, at a minimum, are of critical importance.
The last thing you want to do is to spend time and money building a robust social media presence on a platform your customers do not use.
Also, you do not wish to create great content and post it during times your target audience is unlikely to see and respond to it.
Set Measurable Goals for Your Social Media Strategy
Your strategy has to start with the end point in mind. What is it that you hope to achieve? Be specific here.
The goals you list (and yes, you really should write them down) must be as accurate as you can make them.
Your goals need to be measurable and tied to specific metrics, contain a clearly defined timeframe, and most importantly, they’ve got to be realistically attainable ( for example “We’ll consider our campaign a success if we can increase sales by 5% over the next twelve months”).
Never Stop Tracking Your Results
Earlier, we mentioned that when you set goals for your campaign, these objectives need to be clearly defined and tied to specific metrics.
That is crucial, but it only matters to the extent that you take the time actually to track them.
If you are not following the metrics relevant to your campaign, and then using what you learn to modify your campaign as you go, you are wasting your time.
You may see some degree of success, and you may not. If you do, but you are not tracking the metrics relevant to your campaign, the success you see may have something to do with the campaign itself, or it may have been caused by something else entirely.
If you are not tracking, you’ve got no information either way. You are simply flying blind and hoping for the best.
That is not a recipe for long-term success.
Keep Your Content Sharable
There are two components to creating shareable content.
The first is, of course, to create content that’s easy to share, and second, content that is of extremely high quality.
Such content is defined by the following characteristics:
- Consumable – small, easy to read and digest bits of information, rather than the dreaded “wall of text.”
- Compelling – your content needs to have a wow factor to grab the reader/viewer’s attention
- Timely – the most shareable content is something that has a sense of urgency and/or has a sense of immediacy to it. For instance, an up-tempo video describing an exciting new product launch is almost certain to be shared more often than a detailed history of your company’s origins.
- Helpful – if your content provides information that helps solve an actual problem for your readers, it’s much more likely to be shared.
Engagement is the Secret Ingredient
Social media is, by definition, social. If you want to get the most out of your social media platform, and the campaign you orchestrate from it, then it’s not enough to simply post great content.
Great content demands a response, and your readers will inevitably comment on it. When they do, you need to be prepared to answer them.
To use their comments as the catalyst to begin a conversation, then maintain that communication over the long term.
This not only helps you build your presence and your brand on the social media channel you are using, but it increases customer engagement, which increases the visibility and trust your readers have in your company.
This is what ultimately leads to an increase in sales. If you are not engaging with your readers when they comment on the content you create, then you are just spinning your wheels.
You’ll never get anywhere like that.
The other thing to keep in mind here is the fact that social media is not a “once and done” event, but an ongoing, ever-evolving process.
Over time, you are going to discover things that actually work well for you and other things you try that have little to no impact.
You are going to be able to tell them apart because you are tracking metrics and monitoring your progress, and when you find things that aren’t working, you are going to remove those from your playbook, and focus on the things that are having an immediate impact.
For instance, you may discover that your readers don’t care much for your infographics, but when you post a “behind the scenes look” at how products are developed in your company, which includes members of your staff wearing a Go-Pro helmet cam and taking to the streets to interview actual customers, it gets tons of comments and shares, you’re going to naturally gravitate away from the former and toward the latter, and that’s exactly as it should be.
Designing and running a successful social media campaign isn’t hard, but there’s a science to it.
A clearly defined method.
Stray too far from that method, and you may still find some level of success, but if you stick to a plan that’s been proven time and time again to deliver solid results, you’ll see even more.
It’s just that simple.
Image: Copyright: ‘http://www.123rf.com/profile_marish‘ / 123RF Stock Photo
Ron Sela
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- Your Recipe For A Successful Social Media Strategy - December 3, 2015
