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20 Tips For Creating A Strong Social Media Strategy That Will Work

Social media is one of the most powerful tools in your marketing arsenal. If it is used correctly, it can create a strong personal connection with prospective customers. However, marketers often make a mistake of diving into social media without a clear plan. It can be a waste of time and can even possibly trigger a PR disaster. To benefit from social media, you need to build a clear strategy that takes into account what you are trying to achieve, who your customers are and what your competition is doing.

Developing a robust social media marketing strategy will help boost brand awareness, increase the numbers of followers you have, drive traffic to your website and generate leads for your sales funnels. No brand should be without a plan that actively places their business on social media.

Social media is an excellent place for brands to have some fun while achieving results. A strong social media strategy should work in tandem with the rest of your business strategies and processes.

To ensure that your social media marketing campaigns contribute to your brand’s greater business objectives, here are 20 tips for creating a strong social media strategy that will work:

1. Ensure That Your Social Goals Can Solve Challenges

Goal setting is a staple to all marketing and business strategies, including social media. With social media, you can be easily distracted which can make it difficult to determine exactly what your objectives. In order to stay on track, you need to look at the challenges before you and set goals based on the obstacles you want to tackle.

2. Extend Efforts Through Your Organization

Social media has long lived within the marketing department. It does not mean that it can’t have a hand in nearly every business function, from human resources to research and development. To create a fully integrated social media marketing campaign, you’ll need to involve and integrate multiple departments, especially if your goals have a direct impact on them. Work with your team to determine how you can best support each other’s goals and identify the key performance indicators that are important for you.

3. Focus On Networks That Add Value

Billions of users does not necessarily mean it will have a direct contribution to your brand’s objectives. Instead of trying to be everything to everyone, you need to focus your efforts on social networks that hold the key to your target audience and objectives. Each network has its strengths and weakness, and each social media marketer should carefully pick and choose which networks they want to take advantage of.

4. Create Engaging Content

It isn’t all about hard selling your audience on social networks at every turn. Instead, you should be focused on creating content that they can relate to and engage with. Build a funnel rather than focusing on converting every post into profits for your business.

5. Identify Business Opportunities Through Social Media

With millions of messages being sent across social channels every day, there is no doubt conversations are happening around your brand. Social media monitoring should be an essential part of your social media marketing strategy. Not only can you mediate situations involving your business, but you can collect a lot of important data to further grow your company.

6. Engage With Your Customers And Don’t Ignore Them

Whether someone is commenting on a post you’ve made, writing on your wall or mentioning you on Twitter, it’s important always to stay engaged. If customers are consistently ignored, they’ll eventually ditch your brand and they will look for an alternative. Be sure to respond to clients who have left negative feedback about your brand as well. Too many companies have lost favor with their fans by trying to delete the message and sweeping things under the rug.

7. Understand Your Goals

The first step in creating a social media marketing strategy is to understand where you want to go. What is the purpose of your social media marketing efforts? Do you want to create or raise awareness of your brand? Are you looking to increase sales, website traffic or both? Is your goal to build customer loyalty and improve retention? These goals aren’t mutually exclusive, but you should focus on one or two. If you spread yourself too thin, you’re not going to accomplish anything.

8. Look At The Competition

When it comes to social media, your competition can tell you a lot about what works and what doesn’t. After all, they’re targeting the same customers as you. If you ignore your competition, you’re giving up a fantastic opportunity to learn from their successes and mistakes. To research your competitors, start by picking three or four of the top ones. Find out which social networks they’re active on and study their content.

9. Develop Your Messages

Once you know what your marketing approach is, you need to build a message around it. What is going to be your mission statement? How are you going to craft a message that is going to benefit your brand? There’s nothing wrong with adopting some of your competitors’ successful messaging ideas, but also try to create original messages that can set you apart from them.

10. Choose Your Channels

Not all social media platforms are the same. You need to sometimes even cater different content marketing strategies based on the network you are on. You may find that one type of content performs better on one platform versus another.

11. Be Clear on Your Target Audience

Knowing and understanding your target audience is the prerequisite to a strong digital marketing strategy. It’s important to know who you’re aiming to reach in your marketing so you can focus your efforts on engaging and connecting with that audience.

12. Be Social

Don’t simply share your content and hope people will interact with your business. Be social – it is after all called ‘social’ media. Comment, like and share your follower’s content. When fans respond to your content, highlight them in the comments. You can also message customers and prospects personally to show appreciation for their support. You’ll be amazed at how these small personal touches can give you an edge with your audience.

13. Increase Daily Updates

Ensuring that your posts and updates have a good chance to be seen by your target audience is an integral part of a content strategy. For example, it’s recommended to post around 5-10 times a day on Twitter and 1-4 times a day on Facebook for optimal impressions. Almost all research highlights the best posting hours to be from 8 am to 8 pm.

14. Follow Social Media Changes

If you’ve used Facebook for your business for some time now, I’m sure you’ve been frustrated numerous times. Why? Well, Facebook likes to change their algorithm and those changes aren’t often favorable for business owners. If you don’t constantly adapt and keep up with the changes social media platforms are making, you’ll very easily be left behind.

15. Make Everything Mobile-Friendly

People are more attached to their mobile phones now. Whether it’s your sales funnel, landing pages or a piece of content you share on social media, make sure it’s mobile-friendly. More social media content is used on mobile than on any other device right now.

16. Introduce Content With Creativity

With social media, you can introduce new content in many different ways. Whether it’s in the form of infographics, videos, blog posts or something else, there are tons of ways to do it. Lock in on what works well with your brand and your audience. After you figure that out, you can create a ton of good content from that point forward.

17. Present Your Human Side With Photos

Photos and other types of visual content are highly shareable on social networks. When you post photos of your team, it helps to show your business as a human brand and build relationships with your community. Social media has made it possible for you to share information about your business in a multitude of ways. Photos can show your serious, productive, silly, creative, successful and charitable sides while keeping things very personal.

18. Question Readers for More Engagement

Questions are a good example of engaging content and have become a frequent go-to tactic, especially on platforms such as Facebook. I have gotten tremendous advice for my businesses just by asking my audience questions. Survey your audience when you need to for engagement and education!

19. Utilize Online Tools

There are tons of online tools readily available on the internet that can help you with your social media efforts. Whether you’re looking for a tool to grow your audience or to schedule posts out, there’s something there for every business owner!

20. Use a Conversational Tone For Engagement 

Social media has changed the way businesses communicate publicly. Explore your culture, community, and conversation as you develop your social media voice. Rather than being overly formal like many of us have been taught to be, you can have fun and be yourself with social media. Believe me, your audience will appreciate and connect better with you.

Conclusion

When it comes to improving your social media presence, you need to follow strategies that will enhance and lead your business to success. In this post, I shared with you 20 tips for creating a strong social media strategy that will work.

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