A well-oiled social media management team is a must for any business. Define policies that will help your team work efficiently, and choose software that provides insights in a format your whole team can review daily.
Identifying the best time to post on social media is key. Doing a competitive analysis will also help you understand the best ways to grow your audience.
1. Define Your Goals
The first step to creating a winning social media strategy is to define your goals. This will help you determine what types of content to create, what social media platforms to use and how often to post.
You can set both short and long term goals. These can include anything from increasing brand awareness to generating leads. Make sure to revisit your goals regularly and update them as necessary.
When creating your goals, it is important to make them measurable, actionable and achievable. This will ensure that you are on track to meet your objectives and see a return on your investment. For example, if your goal is to increase the number of clicks on your lead generation posts, you will need to track the performance of those posts on a monthly basis.
2. Identify Your Audience
Using data from your Google and email analytics, along with social media platforms like Sprout’s Group Report, will help you build a picture of your target audience. This information will influence everything from your marketing content to customer service and product development.
Identifying your audience helps you decide what type of content to create and where to post it. It will also help you create a strategy for reaching those audiences.
For example, Facebook offers the ability to search for people by age group, location and interests. By using this feature, you can find your ideal customers and reach them on the platform that they use most. This will increase your chances of converting them into customers. It will also prevent you from wasting time on social networks that don’t serve your goals.
3. Create a Content Calendar
Once you’ve identified your goals and audience, the next step is to create a content calendar. A content calendar helps you plan and organize your social media posts ahead of time so that you’re always posting relevant content to your audience.
Your content calendar should include the headline or title of each post, the publishing date and any important events that you want to highlight (like a company milestone). A good content calendar will also allow your team members to assign responsibilities to each item on the list.
It’s also a good idea to create a library of content assets that perform well so that you can re-incorporate them into your strategy in the future. Using a social media management tool with a content calendar view will make this process even easier for teams of all sizes.
4. Create a Social Media Schedule
A social media schedule is a hyper-detailed, platform-specific plan of upcoming posts organized by publish date and time. It should include all relevant content elements like photos, videos, links, @-mentions and copy. It should also account for the audience engagement patterns you uncovered during your audit and competitive analysis.
It should also be a document that helps your team save time and streamlines collaboration by making it easier to edit, fact-check, and green-light content before publishing. It should also help you stay on top of social trends and maximize the performance of existing assets by storing high-performers in a centralized library for easy reuse. This is an iterative process; your schedule should be reevaluated on a regular basis and should be tool-agnostic. It should also be based on measurable goals and ROI.
5. Monitor Your Results
Developing a winning social media strategy takes time and effort. However, it can yield great results for your business if implemented correctly.
Your goals can be as simple as boosting brand awareness, increasing follower count or driving traffic to your website. It’s important to set specific and measurable goals that are aligned with your target audience.
Monitoring your social media and web mentions in real-time helps you quickly identify what tactics are working or not. You can also use tools like sentiment analysis to see how people are responding to your content. This information can then influence your strategy. This allows you to focus on the tactics that are producing the best results and delivering a return on your investment.
