6 Tips for Building a Social Media Strategy

It’s the digital age – not utilizing online presence on social media platforms is will only get you so far in your effort to grow your business and brand.

Social media is, essentially, a direct bridge between your brand and your target audience.

It allows you to connect with your potential customers, and helps you get the word of your brand out in the open – where it’s supposed to be.

Having a sound-proof social media strategy in place will help you develop and grow your business and brand faster.

To help you build an effective social media strategy, we’ve prepared helpful advice that can really guide you on your way towards success.

Set actionable and measurable goals.

Don’t think about your social media strategy just yet – first comes defining and listing out your objectives and goals. It’s of utmost importance that you figure out the purpose of your brand and its online presence, as well as determine what you want your social media strategy to achieve.

Increasing the awareness of your brand, building brand loyalty, generating more sales, positioning yourself as authority in your chosen industry – these are just common, yet essential goals that you can achieve for your brand through social media.

Expert Tip: Use the SMART method when setting goals. Define your goals in a specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound manner. Setting them in this way also helps you track your progress along the way with ease. 

Define your target audience

Now that you know what you want to achieve with your social media presence, it’s time to identify your target audience.

Unless you don’t adequately pin-point who your target audience is, your strategy won’t really get you to where you want to go, or produce the results you are hoping for.

Why?

The content you will be producing and generating NEEDS to be specifically suited to the wants and needs of your target audience.

Defining your target audience can be done based on a few parameters, such as location, demographics, and psychographics.

It's also crucial to understand their pain points, because you need to create content that addresses those pain points and helps solve them. This will help make you your customers' go-to source of information on your business's area of expertise. It's through these pain points that you can market your products or services too.

Tailor your offerings to the audience in a way that shows how your product or service will help solve their problems. 

Study the competition

Building your content strategy requires you to study your competition.

Thoroughly and carefully analyzing your competitors will help you understand which tactics, or content types are effective, and which ones are not as good.

What this will also allow you is to be aware of the mistakes they are making in their social media marketing, so you can build your social media strategy accordingly.

The objective here is not to directly copy or steal the strategies of your competitors. It is, in fact, to gather insights and adapt and improve upon their strategies to create your own.

Build a robust content strategy

As always – content is king.

Without having adequate content that reflects who you are as a brand and what you stand for - you cannot create a strong social media strategy.

Wide range of engaging and educational content can help you strengthen your social media presence, connect with your customers, and hopefully, convert them into your loyal followers.

Since there are a lot of content types you can add to your social media strategy (text, images, podcasts, videos), ensure that you are choosing the right content type for the right audience.

Furthermore, figuring out the right times and right frequency to post is also really important. This is where the analysis you used to define your target audience will be useful once again. It will give you insight into the times when your customers are likely to be most active.  

Conclusion

Social media is a powerful tool for your business.

It can increase your visibility, enhance relationships, establish two-way communication with customers, provide feedback, and improve the awareness and reputation of your brand.

You must first develop a comprehensive social media communication strategy and then incorporate best practices in the implementation of that strategy.

If you need any help incorporating social media for your business, my agency H.V. Social Media is just a click away.