Some Important Social Media Strategy Information

Social media is now an important part of any business plan. However, you need to do more than just post content to use these platforms effectively for your business. This is where a plan for social media can help you reach your goals.

Having a clear plan of what you want to do and organised steps for how to do it can make all the difference. So how do you start making your own social media plan?

In this blog, Jainya x Collective’s expert team talks about the steps you need to take and things you need to keep in mind when coming up with a social media strategy.

First, you need to know what you want to achieve with your social media strategy and how media marketing works. When you use social media platforms and social networks to market your brand, you are doing social media marketing.

With this method of marketing, brands can reach out to both their current customers and people who might become customers in the future. Also, this lets brands show what they stand for, how they talk, and who they are. With all of this in mind, it’s clear that social media marketing is used to spread the word about a brand, advertise, track performance, and help customers.

With all of these possible benefits, not using social media marketing in your business plan could hurt the success of your brand. Now that we’ve talked about how important a social media strategy is, let’s talk about what it should include.

In your social media strategy, you should explain what your goals are, how you plan to reach them, and how you will measure your progress. The strategy should be put into action so that it can be changed as needed based on how the wants and needs of your target audience change, as well as the cultural climate, such as popular trends. When you’re coming up with your social media strategy, keep these five basic steps in mind:

1. Setting specific goals that are in line with the big business goals

Having goals is an important part of your social media strategy because it’s the best way to track your progress and figure out how well you’re doing. The S.M.A.R.T framework should be used to set your goals.

Following this framework will help you with creating realistic goals that can be measured within a specific time frame. This way, you can track your progress effectively and most importantly, track for areas of improvement. As for what metrics you should be looking at when tracking these goals, you should be looking at the ones that are most relevant to how your brand is doing.

Sometimes a lot of likes on a post doesn’t particularly mean your brand is doing well. Look for metrics, such as saves, likes, shares, comments, how long a viewer spent watching your video, how long social media users are spending on your website, and more.

The information you get from these numbers demonstrates how well your audience is engaging with your brand. With this information, you can determine whether changes need to be made to the strategy.

2. Defining Your Target Audience Once you have an idea of the goals you want to achieve, it’s time to think of who will help you achieve those goals. That’s right, your customers! To get good engagement and loyal customers, it’s crucial to understand your target audience, like what demographics do they fall under? Create a customer profile questionnaire that includes the following inquiries:

These types of questions will help you distinguish exactly who you are targeting and how you can better cater your marketing strategy towards them. This can be done by creating a brand persona and tone that reflects this specific customer.

Additionally, to this, on social media, you can even learn about your target audiences’ consumer behaviours based on how they interact with content from brands like yours.

3. Complete a SWOT, PEST, and Competitor Analysis After you’ve defined your target audience, you can then proceed to further research the industry you’re entering, where you are at as a business and where your competitors are. Investigating further into this information can prove to be very useful for what to include and what not to include in your strategy and marketing tactics.

A SWOT analysis stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. You’ll want to ask yourself – What are some of the strengths and weaknesses your business currently has? What are some of the opportunities and threats you will face? Further to completing a SWOT analysis for your brand, you can then figure out where your strategy needs improvement and areas to maintain.

PEST analysis stands for Political, Environmental, Social and Technological. This analysis allows you to examine the socio-economic factors that impact the industry you are working in. By getting a good general understanding of the social climate, you can use this information to make changes to your strategy where applicable.

Finally, a competitor analysis, which is known to be one of the most vital components to shaping your social strategy, as it highlights what the competition looks like and gives you the necessary information you need to differentiate your brand from them.

From here you can take inspiration from competitors to create tactics that will help you grow and define your style as a brand.

4. Get to Know Your Social Platforms Part of your social media strategy is to understand which platforms will be most beneficial for your brand, how are you planning on staying active, and how to tailor your strategy to each platform’s guidelines.

This is because what works on Instagram may not work on Twitter or TikTok. Each account that you have on separate platforms must reflect your brand but also be able to work with the features that are unique to each platform.

Quality is better than quantity, so pick a handful of social platforms that you would like to focus on and create detailed strategies on them.

This can be done by researching what content is best received on those platforms, what’s trending on these social media platforms (hashtags, songs, challenges), what content is best received by your audience, and what unique features each application has to offer, such as stories and reels and more.

By knowing what each group of users want and like to see on each platform, you can effectively reach your goals.

5. Staying Organized and Consistent Staying organized and consistent should be the main part of your social media strategy, as when and how often you post make a great difference. This is something that can be done with a little trial and error to see what your audience engages with the most and what time during the day are they most active on their social platforms. Some of their favorite third-party platforms to use that will help you with your social content organization are:

With the use of these platforms, you can dissect your social analytics and schedule content accordingly. This content should reflect your brand’s ethos while striving for the goals you set out for. For example, sometimes you may want to follow different tactics, like the 80/20 rule, which focuses on 80% of the content being entertaining, educational, and exciting, meanwhile 20% of it focuses on your business’ services or products.

6. Continue to Adjust Strategy Accordingly If you couldn’t already tell from the previous steps, curating a social media strategy is very much a process of trial and error, by distinguishing what really works best for your brand and what you should stay away from in your strategy.

This means it is important that you are open to accommodating and adjusting to the options available to you and recognize the ones that will benefit your brand and strategy.

Social media can sometimes be unpredictable, you never know what the next trend will be, how long a trend will last, or what new feature will come along that you’ll have to learn, so it’s important to be adaptable!

These fundamental steps are a few of the many necessary steps that Bold x Collective recommends you start with to help formulate your successful social media strategy. They hope this blog helps you get closer to developing your strategy and achieving your goals along the way.

Still not sure how to get started? They’re here to help! Get in touch with their team at Bold x Collective, where they can help you create a bold and creative social media strategy that works for your industry. Their team of expert strategists, marketers, and creatives are here to help.