The average person spends almost 3 hours per day on social media! Capitalizing on this attention is what can help your brand grow, however, ignoring it could cause people to forget about your brand. With the ever-changing social media landscape, it is important to keep up with the latest trends. The same applies to your overall digital marketing strategy as well!
Pick a goal
The first thing to do when planning out your social media strategy is to pick a goal. A few examples of goals are gaining more followers on Instagram, having people watch your latest video, or generating hype about an upcoming product launch.
Choose the platforms you want to post on
There are so many social networks out there, it might seem hard to choose just a few! The most important thing is for you to find where your target audience hangs out online. Check out our post on how to develop your target audience if you need help.
Facebook: With its 1.5 billion active monthly users, this social network is where most social media marketers focus their efforts. While this social network has the highest user count, they only create 100 million pieces of content per day (only 25% are photos).
Instagram: Instagram has 800+ million active monthly users with 95 million images shared per day! The average amount of followers for brands on Instagram is 4 times higher than on Facebook.
LinkedIn: With 467 million users on this social network, it is a great platform to share text-based content. This social media site is particularly helpful if you want to promote posts and engage with companies in your industry.
Pinterest: Pinterest is a social networking site that enables members to create and manage theme-based image collections such as events or topics through virtual pinboards. This social platform can be beneficial if you want to reach people who like to do research online before making purchases.
Twitter: This social network has 322 million active users per month with 500+ million tweets per day! However, this social network is quite noisy as the average person creates 55 tweets per day (two-thirds of which are less than 140 characters). Furthermore, there is an average of 1 billion searches every day on Twitter which makes it easier for people to find your social media content.
Choose the type of content to post
Once you have picked a goal for your target audience and figured out which platform you'll find them on, you can now begin thinking about what type of content to post. Data shows that "content that appeals to emotions tends to elicit larger responses from followers." Additionally, Facebook posts with images see 2 times more engagement compared to those without.
What types of content should I share?
A simple yet effective social media strategy is to focus on sharing helpful content that provides value to your target audience. This social media strategy can be applied to Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.
Create a content calendar
It can be daunting to make time every single day to write and post social media content. We recommend that you carve out time in your schedule to create posts that you save to a content calendar for future posting. This can be done weekly or monthly and we prefer using Google Sheets or Excel spreadsheets to save your content for future posting. This will save you quite a bit of time and headache.
Measure results
Before social media marketing existed, the only way people knew how successful their campaigns were was by measuring website traffic and sales. While social networks do provide analytics, many social media marketers may not know that there are tools they can use that specifically track social media engagement such as MeetEdgar. Other online marketing platforms like Google Analytics also track social media metrics now! By comparing these metrics over time, you can see which content performs well (and what doesn't) so you can refine your social media content strategy accordingly.
Keep social networks clean
Keeping social media accounts clean is a must because it not only reflects poorly on your company but you might be penalized by social networks as well. There are several social media tools out there to help you schedule posts and save time, allowing you to concentrate on other social media tasks such as creating engaging social media content or measuring social media performance. This will allow you to create a consistent social presence that actually works for your business!
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