Social Media Strategy: Creating a Plan for Growth

Hootsuite defines a social media strategic plan as a summary of everything you plan to do and hope to achieve on social media. It guides your actions and lets you know whether you are succeeding or failing. The more specific the plan, the better. Creating a strategic plan gives brand’s an opportunity to build a strong, organic presence, and target audiences more effectively according to Social Media Today. Without a plan, how can brand's measure growth? How can they see where they need to improve?

Goals are one of the most important parts of a social media strategy. They go hand-in-hand with what a brand’s objective is for the campaign and should align with the mission of the brand. Sprout Social advises to begin a plan with a broad objective. For example, a small business’s objective could be to engage followers and expand brand awareness. SMART goals create a framework for how to approach, measure and evaluate your plan and objective. What are SMART goals, exactly? Medium.com explains them as goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and time sensitive. 

Photo: Falcon.io

For each goal a brand makes, Buffer.com suggests breaking them down into tactics. Tactics are important because they lay out what strategies can be used to achieve specific goals. Let’s use the example of a new bar that just opened. One of their goals might be to promote their events, which include trivia night. A good tactic to achieve that goal could be to post teaser videos on social media with trivia questions leading up to the event. According to another Buffer.com article on the subject, video content is ideal for engagement. So, a video to tease trivia fits the goal while also increasing the number of people engaging with the brand. 

Lately, it’s time to evaluate. This is the time brand’s can go and see what worked and what didn’t work by seeing how goals measured up and if they were achieved. Strategic plans in the ever-changing world of social media and communications brings success and failure. Having a strategic plan in the first place can give brand’s confidence in knowing where to improve and what to capitalize on moving forward.

Higher education social media strategy

I currently work for Kennesaw State University in the Radow College of Humanities and Social Sciences (RCHSS). The mission of the college is to prepare students with a Liberal Arts education that empowers them to understand the human condition, to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century, and to become contributing citizens in a global society. RCHSS offers 23 undergraduate degrees, seven master’s programs, a doctoral program, six graduate certifications and 36 minors. The programs range from communication and media to psychological science and interdisciplinary studies. 

On social media, RCHSS mostly approaches social media with an educational and informative voice. The vast majority of posts are stories on faculty research, student success, and upcoming events. Over the past year, the college has spotlighted faculty research with the Thought Provoking podcast that releases once per month. 

In completing a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis of RCHSS on social media, I noticed that the college and its competitors do similar things. Georgia State’s College of Humanities promotes events, shares stories related to the college and retweets college-wide information from GSU’s main account. Meanwhile, University of Georgia’s Franklin College, which houses humanities, is more inconsistent with posting than both RCHSS and Georgia State.

The main strength of RCHSS is posting consistent content directed at multiple audiences. Weakness-wise, there seems to be a lack of video content. One of the main goals is to increase engagement. As mentioned earlier, Buffer.com noted that video content is ideal for engagement.  

With students becoming more and more comfortable with social media these days, there is a lot of opportunity for user-generated content on RCHSS’s social media platforms. Whether that’s in the form of students promoting programs or a simple Instagram takeover, there are a lot of areas for growth and learning. The main threats to RCHSS are other colleges with similar programs in the state. The University System of Georgia houses 26 colleges and universities. Kennesaw State is one of the largest, but still not as well known as the University of Georgia, Georgia Tech or Georgia State. 

I’m going to propose a social media plan for RCHSS to help grow engagement:

• Goal: Increase engagement on the RCHSS Instagram account. Instagram has over 500 million daily users, according to Shopify. Hootsuite notes that 18-34 year olds are the main demographic of users logging onto Instagram more than once a day. This is the age range of college freshman to graduates.
• Objective: To have an engagement increase of 20% on RCHSS Instagram during the Fall 2021 semester. The objective of increasing engagement 20% aligns with the overall goal of engaging with more users. Engaging with users also helps to increase following over time. Since the summer semester is approaching, it’s important to take time and plan out the content calendar for the fall. The timeline for this plan is through the Fall 2021 semester, when new students come to campus and the opportunity for more engagement is there. The key demographic to target for this campaign is going to be current students. 
• Strategy: RCHSS will host more video content on Instagram. Biteable.com dives into the way video content is growing year by year in marketing. Over 600 marketers were polled by Biteable and 68 percent of them said that video has better return on investment than Google Ads. Based on the statistics of video content and its use to engage with users, this strategy will almost certainly back up the objective to increase engagement. 
• Tactics: Host weekly Instagram takeovers. Capture user-generated content. Create short commercials for degree programs. Students will takeover the RCHSS Instagram account as park of a weekly Takeover Tuesday campaign to increase engagement. In addition, students will have an opportunity to send in 60-second videos on their KSU experience that can be directed at prospective students. Finally, creating short commercials for degree programs, certificates and minors will not only hit the current student audience, but also be good for prospective students. A social media strategy should have multiple tactics, so hitting a few different types of video could help growth even further.
• Evaluation: Each week, Instagram data will be pulled to analyze engagement and growth. At the end of the Fall 2021 semester, all data will be combined to see the success of video content. It will be compared to the previous year, where static imagery was the primary form of content.