Social media can be a lot to take in all at once, especially when you’re just starting out. To help, here’s a quick compilation of some of my social media tips to set you up for implementing a killer social media strategy.
These are the ten must-haves for a strategy in order to build an authentic, engaged social media community for your brand.
Hopefully they help.
1. Define Clear Goals
This is the foundation of your social media management or campaign strategy. Defining goals (and objectives) gives you direction, purpose, and will help you narrow down the main themes your content will revolve around.
2. Get To Know Your Audience
This is also one of the most important parts of your social strategy. Get to know your audience demographics, but beyond that, get to know what makes them tick.
Ask them what their pain points are, find out what publications they read, and where they hang out. All of this info will help you craft content that truly resonates with them, and helps you build an engaged community.
3. Choose the Right Platforms
Do your research and get to know how each social media network operates, and choose the right ones for your brand.
Is your target audience active in the network? Do you have the resources to create the content required for the specific channel?
4. Create a Content Bank
Now that you have your objectives laid out, and you know which networks you’d like to be active on, you should look to create a content bank.
Review all of your offline marketing materials and consider how you can support them online with content. Create or source content which supports your objectives. Oh, the time and headaches you’ll save yourself with this one.
5. Identify Keywords and Hashtags
A little more research here, but collecting a bank of the top industry keywords or hashtags your audience is using will make for easier messaging composition.
Finding the right hashtags is key to reaching your target audience – there’s a range of tools you can use to help with this.
6. Create a Content Schedule
After you have your bank of content you need to create a schedule.
Based on your objectives and the amount of content you have, decide how often you’d like to post on social media and on what days. I suggest using a mix of live and scheduled posts for a balance of your content, and to remain current with topics in the industry or that relate to your audience.
7. Set Up Social Tools
To help save time, look to utilize the various social media tools on offer. Some of my favorites are Hootsuite or AgoraPulse for planning and scheduling posts. I also use Bit.ly for shortening and light tracking of links.
Everyone will have a preference for different tools, so be sure to try a few and go with the ones that make the most sense to you.
8. Set Your Analytics
I love analyzing what’s working and what’s not across all my clients’ accounts – it’s an essential part of tweaking and improving your social media strategy. Navigating analytics can be confusing, since each network has so many metrics to keep track of. In general I suggest you pay attention to your follower growth, reach of your posts, and more importantly, how engaged your audience is with your content.
You also need to pay attention to which days and times work best – getting your timing right is essential to extending the reach of your posts.
9. Conduct a Social Media Audit
Make it a habit of conducting a social media audit on your channels periodically.
A self-audit can help you catch inconsistencies across channels, what campaigns worked (or not) review benchmarks, and maybe even set new goals, enabling you to consistently improve your social media strategy.
10. Keep an eye on the competition
You can learn so much from watching others.
Watch what your competitors do well – and what flops so you don’t make the same mistakes.
As a bonus – make sure your images are as high quality as possible, and think about creating a theme for your accounts for you more advanced users.
Hopefully this collection of tips will give you a good base to get started.
This post was first published on Dhariana Lozano’s blog.