Creating A Winning Social Media Strategy

Social media is easy when one is managing their own personal profile. When using it as part of an online marketing strategy for a business with multiple communications channels and strategic goals, things can start to get tricky. There is a lot to pay attention to, even seemingly small issues such as sending out updates at the right time, using the right tone and voice and knowing which sites to use play a detrimental factor in success or failure. In this article, we provide businesses with the perfect framework to create a winning social media strategy. Like with anything in business, time must be invested tosocial media marketing plan pdf see any kind of worthwhile return. A common trap businesses fall into is creating too many social media accounts and not spending enough time on them. As a rule of thumb, aim to spend 4-5 hours each week per platform. For example, businesses who can only aggregate 8-10 hours of social media work between their employees should limit their strategy to only 2 accounts. Why? Because starting a social media account is very time consuming, during the startup process there will be social media marketing best practices little engagement and time must be invested in order for it to grow. Spending an hour per week on several different social media sites will not provide results. With more than a hundred social media platforms to choose, finding the right platforms can be difficult. The following should be factored in when making the decision: Is it content friendly? – If the majority of updates will be articles, blogs posts, white papers and other forms of written content, there will be little reason to use Instagram or Pinterest (image dominated platforms). Focus on picking platforms that provide the appropriate content distribution.

THE MANY HATS OF A SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGER

As a Social Media Manager for MGR Consulting Group, I’m constantly reading a variety of social media articles in search of inspiration, enlightenment and new experiences. I always seem to find something useful to apply to the campaigns that I manage: a tip, a tool, a secret (and yes, I will share here with you some of my own social media secrets…). But social media management experiences differ greatly from person to person and brand to how to start a social media marketing business brand. We all leave a part of ourselves in every piece of content that we create and share: our thoughts, our point of views, a pinch of our personalities, and that’s what makes managing social profiles for brands so exciting and challenging at once. Check everything that happened on the channels I manage while I was sleeping. Check the likes, the comments, the shares, the reach, the performance in general. Social media moves very fast so you can expect insights, and usually helpful information that you will want to keep for the future. To learn about all this performance I use all the insights / analytics / stats tools that every social channel provides because there is where you’ll find the basics, and they’re usually very informative in terms of general or more specific ideas of how the channels are doing. Comments usually appear during the assessment or “checking” process. I read through them and decide whether they can be answered immediately (if it’s an easy question), “like” the comment how to social media marketing and give thanks to the commenter (if it’s a nice comment) or forward the comment to someone more appropriate to address certain issues. In spite of what you read, comments don’t necessarily have to be answered within 24 hours, that would be ideal, but experience has taught me that it’s best to be a little late than sorry. People will always appreciate a helpful answer rather than a careless response, the get-you-out-of-the-way kind.

Make the Big Kahunas aware of the results

In any marketing initiative, it’s important to get C-level buy in. In the relatively new avenue of social media marketing, there may be at least one exec who is skeptical about the value of social media in general and strongly advocates for staying the course with more traditional marketing initiatives. It’s marketing’s job to ensure that the business leaders understand why social media is important to the bottom line and realizes real, meaningful results. Create an easy-to-read report outlining the overall goals with the planned actions and investments. Including multiple charts and graphics to communicate social media marketing 2014 data will help readers visualize the results of your work. While you may want to design your own report, social media management tools offer comprehensive reporting capabilities that can streamline this process for your team. Professional marketers understand the potential of connecting with leads on social media platforms, and how doing so successfully serves to increase the bottom line. Even if you design the most outrageously brilliant social media campaign ever, know that it can always be improved. And, careful analysis of the results will show you how. Proving that your time and money was spent well is important, but it’s even more important to become a marketer armed with insights that you can use to continually tweak your social media strategy. With a plan in place, social media activity can be best social media marketing scheduled and managed. Engagement is the ideal and the more people that “like” and share your content, the better for your brand and the impact of online marketing efforts. Because of the 24 hour nature of social media (and who hasn’t checked their Facebook or email last thing at night?), engagement is a round-the-clock task. Automation tools are invaluable to help schedule content in advance, freeing the marketing and customer service teams to respond and interact with ‘live’ feeds. Social media management tools can also help to categorise content in groups or campaigns, monitor trending or buzzwords and measure click through on links. But beware – social media is called social for a reason and always benefits from the human touch.