Social media is growing, and we all know it. The phenomena that hit the internet and took off in the early 2000s has become a large part of most of our lives. It wasn’t until later into its popularity, that profit was seen to be attainable. Social media marketing started to follow and has sprouted from traditional adverts to product placements with influencers. Now we all want to know how to create a social media strategy.
All businesses, small and large, want a piece of what is on offer. Hopefully, this article will shed some light on the topic. Do you want to grow your business? Do you want a wider audience? As well as more sales? Well, these tips should help you get there.
Identify The Best Platforms For Your Social Media Strategy
The first way to think about how to create a social media strategy is to decide on the platforms you want to use. The way you can decide this is by figuring out your audience. Are you after the young adults to sell your clothing line to? If so, Instagram could be for you. Are you looking for an older age group who might be interested in buying a house or appliances? Facebook could be the perfect place. Or are you looking for a much younger audience to present your new mobile phone app to? The platform you want might be Snapchat.
Or if you are looking to hit multiple target audiences, a mixture of platforms could be more beneficial. What social media platforms are there? You can take your pick from Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, Tiktok, Reddit, Pinterest, YouTube, and many others.
First, look up the demographics of the social media sites you are interested in. Then compare that to your own target audience. However, even once you choose the site you want to focus on, make sure to use the others too. It is important to create a profile for your business. To do this, you need to use multiple platforms to create your own platform. You could encourage followers from one social media to check out your others and gain a larger audience. This way, you are reaching the most people and have the best potential for growth.
However, saying that, do not waste time. You don’t need to promote your service or product everywhere. For example, a site with a very specific audience, that you aren’t interested in reaching, isn’t worth your time. You don’t need to cater to everyone. Have an aim. Then work towards it.
Figure Out a Posting Schedule For Your Social Media Strategy
Another way of figuring out how to create a social media strategy is by making a schedule. Social media is a busy place, but there are peaks and troughs where people are most and least active. If you can find these out, you can work out when is the best time to post.
Insights
One way of doing this is by looking for your social media insights. There are different places on the platform apps where you can find these. Within these insight tools, you can usually find some helpful statistics. An example of this is on Instagram. You can see the number of accounts reached, content interaction rates, and data about your audience. In the audience data, there is a breakdown of gender, age range, and top locations. This can show you who exactly is seeing your posts.
However, you can only access this insights tool if your social media account is a business or creator account. If you are set up as a business or creator account, you can access these stats. Beyond this, you can also see the most active times. This is a crucial tool to use when deciding on a posting schedule. From this, you can see the hours on each day of the week, that your followers are most active. For example, you can see that on Mondays, your followers are most active at 3 pm. Whereas, on Tuesdays, they might be most active at 6 pm.
Using this tool, you can start to build an idea of when you should post. Workaround this structure and plan posts to be ready for upload.
How Often
Most advice suggests posting daily on social media, to get the best interactivity. But if you don’t think you can commit to this, decide what you can do. If you can post once every other day, stick to it. Or even if it is just once a week. Make sure you have a schedule. Then stick to that plan. This way, your audience will see that you are consistent. Then they will be more likely to look out for your posts.
If you break from your schedule, and you don’t post regularly, you can get lost. Your account disappears from your audience’s mind and they might even unfollow you.
Between these posts, you can still be active. You could consider interacting with your audience. Create polls and comment boxes. Reply to comments under your posts. All this activity shows you are putting in the effort to stay involved with your audience.
Going Beyond with Blogging
If you are looking beyond just social media platforms, you could also build a profile through blogging.
Having a good website with regular uploads to a blog can create a great impression. It shows that you care about communicating with your audience. It also shows that you know what you are talking about.
You can provide more in-depth details about the topics your business is involved in. We have advice on how to come up with a blog schedule too in another post. Using a blog and linking your social media is a great way to find out how to create a social media strategy.
Find Out What Content Works Well in Your Niche
To know how to create a social media strategy, you need to know your niche. That could be the topic of the kind of service you offer. For us, Driven Media Solutions has a niche in digital marketing. We offer services and focus our blog on similar topics. This way, the audience who’s interested in what we write about, could also be interested in our services.
Our niche covers complex topics which can’t be solved with one product. There is no simple way around digital marketing, as it is different for all businesses. Therefore, a longer form of content like a blog fits us well. We can connect with our audience, giving advice, suggesting tools to use, and explaining subjects in depth. This all works well in the format of a blog, as it needs space to be written in. This kind of content is not as easy to cover and explain clearly through a small Instagram graphic. Nor could the topic of GDPR compliant B2B marketing lists be explained in full, in one tweet.
It is all about knowing what content works. This way, you can learn how to create a social media strategy, that works perfectly for you and your niche.
Whereas, if you have a physical product, product placement content would work for you. An example of this could be a business that sells unique flavoured crisps. This is niche. And with this niche, a long blog post all about a new flavour, won’t necessarily be what works. It might fail to gain momentum for your marketing campaign.
The kind of content that would be good is something more visual. Get images of your product and push this to your audience. You could also use video content. Maybe someone trying the new flavoured crisps and loving it!
You Might Not Get It Right First Time
Whatever your business sells, you need to know your niche. Once you know it, you can work out the kind of content to produce alongside it.
However, if you don’t know what might work, don’t stress. It’s ok! You can try the field. Have a go at different styles of content. Then share this on your platform and see how your audience receives it. You might get an outstanding winner in terms of the type of content they love. You can learn what they like from using the insights tool I mentioned earlier. If you have a week posting infographics and notice your interactivity dips, then try something new. Get the video content out.
Create Good Content To Boost Engagement
Now you know what content works well for your niche, use it! Create good content and do it regularly. Stick to your schedule and it will boost engagement. It is key you produce quality content, not just a high quantity. This is just as vital to consider when learning how to create a social media strategy.
It can feel like a lot when you need to post daily. However, once you have a routine and you learn what your audience likes, it will get easier. But to start off, make sure you prepare. Have your posts ready before the day they need to be up. In your schedule, plan out what styles of content you want to post when then create it in advance.
It’s so much easier to upload regularly when you are working from a good bank of resources. It seems obvious, but it is a mistake that so many businesses make. They try to hash out a new Facebook post without thinking it through, then it flops. Or, you could even have negative repercussions. If your content is not up to scratch, your audience has no reason to stay involved. A quick unfollow means nothing to them but can lose you a potential customer.
So, make sure that you have a bank of posts to hand. This way, if something were to go wrong, you have time to correct it. Change the post and make it customer ready. It’s what they want to see. No one wants to see a dull, wordy post about a new deal, or a product picture with poor lighting. These small things affect your audience’s perception of you. Impress them as they scroll through social media, bat away the competitors. It will boost engagement. Then this can result in boosted sales!
Hire an Outside Agency To Handle Your Social Media Strategy
This might all sound like a bit too much. One, make sure you post on the right platform. Two, make sure you post regularly. Three, make sure you create the right sort of content for your niche. Four, make sure the content you create is up to scratch. That’s a lot, right? Maybe that feels like too much for you to cope with. Social media isn’t everyone strength. We aren’t all trained in knowing how to handle it. It’s not easy. There are beliefs about content creators or influencers, but when you really see what they do, it’s no small task.
So, don’t feel you have to do it all. Think about hiring an outside agency. It’s not bad. It shows your growth. Employing people beyond just your own team is good. You are spreading your reach and creating a platform for your company.
Doing everything right to engage your audience and boost your sales is time-consuming. Even just making the plan before starting your strategy is hard work. So, an outside agency could be really useful. They can help with all sorts. They can help with the actual posting of content. But they can also help with understanding your audience. Getting specialised skills to decode your engagement, can show what’s working and what needs to change for your business.
A simple google search will help point you in the direction of hiring an outside agency. This can take the stress away and can help you figure out how to create a social media strategy.
Conclusion
I hope this will help you learn how to create a social media strategy. There are lots of tips and tricks in this article, which should help you on your way. To learn about other ways you can grow your business, check out our blog post with seven tools for just that.
You could surprise yourself with your social media. Some companies that have invested in social media have seen huge engagement rates. See their successes here. The airline company Ryanair has found Tiktok a great place to use Gen Z humour and trends to boost their interactivity.
Come back to this blog whenever you need some help. But good luck on your social media journey!