What is a social media strategy?
Business2community.com defines a social media strategy as a detailed blueprint that answers the what, when, how, and why for all the contents you post on your business social page https://www.business2community.com/social-media/what-is-a-social-media-strategy-02179927.
Ever wondered why some social media pages appear tardy?
It’s majorly because that company has not learned how to plan a social media strategy.
Do you know how to plan a social media strategy?
Does your marketing team regularly plan a social media strategy?
Remember, nothing of value can be achieved without proper planning, and marketing is not excluded.
Failure to plan a social media strategy by a marketer would amount to inefficient or ineffective use of that marketer’s social media account. Yogi Berra says it this way;
If you do not know where you are going,
You would end up in someplace
If you intend to improve brand awareness or generate leads, through your social media handles, great! I will show you how to plan a social media strategy that will give you results in a bit.
WHY DO I NEED TO PLAN A SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY?
Before we begin to learn how to plan a social media strategy that would help you improve your brand awareness which would ultimately lead to more sales for your company, let’s see what a working knowledge of how to plan a social media strategy would do for you.
Social media strategies are quite important for the following reasons;
Time Management
If you know how to plan a social media strategy, you would save the time spent on thinking about what social media to market on or what type of marketing should be done.
At the point of planning, you would decide what type of marketing you are more effective at, it could be videos, or content marketing, once this decision process is quite crucial.
Once your strength is determined, the bulk of the energy would be channeled towards using your strength to get your desired result.
You see, knowing how to plan a social media strategy, does not just save your time, it allows you to channel this time to other productive activities.
Achievement of Goals
Knowing how to plan a social media strategy would aid the fulfillment of your company’s goals.
For a company marketing through content creation, the topics of the content works would be structured to represent the goals of the company.
If you know how to plan a social media strategy, you don’t just save time but you also begin to work smart!
Evaluation of strategies
This point flows directly from the point above. Knowing how to plan a social media strategy would keep you informed on the progress made thus far, hence providing an opportunity for a structured evaluation.
Since you already know the goal of your company, you can measure how close you are to the actualization of the goal, and that would also help you decide which steps can be taken to help you actualize the goals.
If you learn how to plan a social media strategy you can rest assured that you would be able to accomplish your goals, as you have already seen it accomplished on paper.
The next step is to work the plan!
Better contents
If you know how to plan a social media strategy, you would by all means create better content.
Creativity is easily seen where a marketer knows how to plan a social media strategy.
If a marketer has a goal to achieve, marketing to him at that point would be what to do with the social media to achieve that goal, but where there is necessarily no target, marketing becomes a monotony of repeated circles, where every point becomes a destination
Learning how to plan a social media strategy would help you ensure that your creativity and the quality of your content do not dwindle.
- Increased traffic
Everyone wants to come back to something they have previously enjoyed, If you give your audience juicy content, you can be sure that they would come looking for you again.
Knowing how to plan a social media strategy does not only help marketers improve their content, and an improved content usually leads more audience checking out your page, this would invariably lead to increased traffic on your social media page.
- Stay ahead of the competition
Knowing how to plan a social media strategy would help you stay ahead of the competition.
The marketers that take out time to plan their social media strategy are usually ahead of their game.
The bulk of their time is spent developing their areas of strength and fulfillment of their goals, before long, they become leaders of their field.
Prevent dry days
Knowing how to plan a social media strategy also goes a long way to help marketer’s particularly content writers never to run out of ideas.
While setting out the social media strategy, Marketers can foresee and plan the steps to take at each time for the achievement of their goals.
Now that you know how important it is for you to know how to plan a social media strategy, are you ready to plan yours?
If you are, let’s see how to plan a social media strategy that would give you the best result.
Below are the steps to take if you want to plan a social media strategy:
- Define your goals
- Define your target audience
- Create your content
- Audit your performance.
Let’s begin already!
Define your goals.
What’s the goal of your company?
What’s your goal?
Defining your goal is the first step to take while learning how to plan a social media strategy. Once your goal is clearly stated out, it’s easier for every other thing to fall in place.
I recommend that the’’ what, why, and how’’ approach be used when planning your goal for your social media strategy.
The What
This is the stage where you determine what you want to achieve and the time frame you hope to work with. This part could read;
I want to increase my social media followership from 1000 to 2000 within 6months.
The Why
An increase in my social media followership from 1000 to 2000persons would mean greater publicity of my brand and that would ultimately mean more sales of my products and services in the long run.
The How
To achieve this goal
- I would post at least one piece of content daily on my social media handle.
- I would improve my brand to be more value-oriented than profit-oriented.
Your social media goals should be in line with the ultimate goal of your brand, that way whatever social media strategy you engage for the fulfillment of your goals would be for the ultimate benefit of your brand.
Also, ensure that you set realistic goals because unrealistic goals can dampen your motivation as a marketer, I bet you want to see results from your efforts,which can only be possible when your goals are realistic.
Define your target audience
Defining your target audience is a major aspect required to plan a social media strategy.
The social media strategy to be chosen is highly dependent on the audience a marketer intends to reach. Your products might be designed for generation alpha, I generation or z generation, millennials, xennials, baby burst, baby boomers, and others.
The generation your audience comprises would determine the marketing channel you would include in your social media strategy.
5WPR survey reveals that 65% of American millennials are more active on Facebook than any other social media. https://martechseries.com/social/social-media-platforms/5wpr-survey-reveals-facebook-used-social-media-platform-among-american-millennials/
If your products are created for the millennials, your marketing channel plan in your social media strategy would majorly Facebook, since that is the most effective channel for that product.
Create your Content platform that most millennia’s engage in.
Once you have spelled out your goals and defined your audience the next critical step to take if you want to plan a social media strategy, is to create your content.
The goals you have would help determine the kind of content you would have.
What’s your brand about?
Which aspect of your brand do you intend to market?
What area of your brand does your goal seek to improve?
Once these questions are answered, then you can now begin to generate content that pertains to the area of interest.
If you have never known how to plan asocial media strategy before this time, this might seem strange, but you would have to outline the contents you intend to create during the duration of a particular period. This is a way to boost your productivity, as you would save the time that would have been spent thinking about the next content to create.
Review and Audit your performance
This content on how to plan a social media strategy is not complete until you include a reminder to audit your performance
Have a schedule for this audit that way, progress can be easily monitored and necessary changes can be carried out where necessary.
Of what use would it be if you plan your social media strategy and there are no positive results to show for it.
To avoid this, your best bet is to always review your progress
CONCLUSION
Don’t just read this post on how to plan a social media strategy
I advise that you sit down and plan your own social media strategy
Knowledge is power only when it is applied. I hope you apply yours today!
I can’t wait to hear your feedback.
Adios!
