5 ways to get started on your social media strategy

Are you one of the many small businesses that hasn’t started using social media channels to market your brand? These days those owners who don’t have a presence on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram or a Facebook Page are missing out potential opportunities to engage with new and existing customers.

When developing your marketing strategy it is vital to put time and money aside to promote your business in the most efficient way possible. Without such a strategy how else will customers know that your business exists? Your strategy should include both offline activities, such as face-to-face networking, attending or exhibiting at shows or conferences, or producing materials like brochures, leaflets or postcards, and online activities that includes keeping a website up-to-date and engagement on social media channels. Your marketing programme should integrate both types of activities and will be dependent upon what products or services you are promoting at the time as well as the type of customer you are trying to attract.

There are a lot of social media channels to choose from but don’t think you need to have a presence on all of them. Choose one channel, where you can engage with your customers the best, and get really good at posting updates and sharing news on it. Expect organic growth and don’t forget to engage and interact with others. It’s called social for a reason.

To be truly effective on social media you need to start with a strategy. 

5 ways to get you started on your social media strategy

1 What do you want to achieve?

Once you have decided to use social media to promote your business you need to ask yourself what you want to achieve from doing so. Do you wish to raise your brand, promote new products or services or increase your engagement with customers? By writing down a list of your goals in a plan you are more likely to achieve them over a period of time. Once you have identified these goals write a few paragraphs against each about what you will do to implement them. Think about how this activity will fit in with the other goals on your marketing plan.

2 Identify which channel to use

Deciding which channel you use will be dependent on who your customers are and where they hang out in the digital world. If you work in the business-to-business sector you’re better off looking at LinkedIn and Twitter, while more consumer focused businesses could work well on Instagram, Facebook or Pinterest. And younger people tend to use Snapchat more than others. But this is a guide only. Plenty of businesses are signing up to Instagram (currently the fastest growing channel of the social media sites) and many small businesses are very effective with their Facebook Page. Once you have identified who your ideal client is undertake further research to see which channels they engage on. There’s no point interacting where your customers aren’t.

3 Understand how social media works

Traditionally businesses used to broadcast their messages via TV, radio or print advertising. They used outdoor billboards, bus stops or advertised in the cinema amongst other things. And businesses never had any real way of knowing if their customers had seen them, read them and then acted upon them. Promoting your brand through social media turns this approach on its head. It’s all about interacting and engaging with customers - starting or joining in a conversation. But what it is not about is the continual hard sell. In the digital world the focus is on building up your ‘know, like, trust’ with customers before they will buy a product or service from you. So your posts should consider how you can help your customer rather than here’s what you can buy from me.

4 Plan what you will write

Most of the social media channels operate in a similar way, some have a greater focus on the image (like Instagram) while others concentrate more on the text (like Twitter). But all need a mix of text and image or video to be the most effective. Once you start using social media you do need to keep up a regular presence on it, which can seem daunting at the outset. But during this planning stage write down a list of the types of content you will write about and share. It doesn’t have to be all created by you, sharing other peoples’ articles that you think your customers will find useful is just as good. You are the expert and sharing relevant, valuable information helps to build up the ‘know, like, trust’ among customers. Put the ideas onto a spreadsheet or a calendar so you know what you will be writing about on a weekly and monthly basis.

5 Develop a process to measure your progress

The beauty of social media is that all channels offer basic analytics where you can measure how well or not you are doing. The analytics become more sophisticated the greater number of followers you have but even that the basic level they all give a good indication of your progress. Part of your strategy should include your goals, which could include generating a certain number of followers over a set period of time, how many comments posts have received or how many link through to your website as a result of the post. Put your goals in place and set aside time each week and month to assess and measure your progress. By doing this you can see what works for you, what doesn’t and you can amend accordingly.

Build the foundations of your social media plan by putting in time and money at the beginning and develop a strategy you can implement and measure your success against. Without such an approach it’s easy to lose focus and wonder why and what you’re spending vital resources on.

What to do next?

1 Write down a list of your goals to get a clear understanding of why you are using social media and create a plan that you can measure your success against

2 Brainstorm ideas so you have a never ending list of topics you can write about. Flesh out ideas with bullet points and create an editorial content calendar

3 Choose one channel, create an account and start writing posts