How to Prepare an Effective Social Media Strategy

Everything You Need to Know for an Effective Social Media Strategy

Social media is now an important part of any business plan. However, you need to do more than just post content to get the most out of these sites. This is where a social media strategy comes in to help reach your goals.

In this blog post, we will discuss the necessary steps you need to take and keep in mind when brainstorming your social media strategy.

The strategy itself should be implemented to change as needed based on changes in your target audience’s wants and needs, as well as cultural climate, such as popular trends. When brainstorming your social media strategy, keep in mind the following five fundamental steps:

1. Creating Specific Goals That Align With Major Business Objectives

Having goals is a key component of your social media strategy, as it’s the most accurate method to track your progress and measure your success. Your goals should follow the S.M.A.R.T framework.

• S – Specific
• M – Measurable
• A – Attainable
• R – Relevant
• T – Time-Bound

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.

Look at the metrics that are relevant to your brand. Sometimes, a lot of likes on a post don’t necessarily 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

To get good engagement and loyal customers, it’s crucial to understand your target audience, like what demographics they fall under. Create a customer profile questionnaire that includes the following inquiries:

• How old is my customer?
• What does my customer do for a living?
• How much does my customer make yearly?
• Where does my customer live?
• What are my customers’ values?
• What does my customer do as a hobby?

These types of questions will help you in creating a brand persona and tone that reflects this specific customer.

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 as a business, and who your competitors are. Investigating further into this information can prove to be very useful for determining 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? After completing a SWOT analysis, you can figure out where your strategy needs improvement and which areas to maintain.

PEST analysis stands for Political, Environmental, Social, and Technological. With this analysis, you can look at how social and economic factors affect the industry you work in. By understanding the social climate, you can use this information to make changes to your strategy.

Finally, competitor analysis is known to be one of the most vital components of shaping your social strategy. It highlights what the competition looks like. This gives you the necessary information you need to differentiate your brand from theirs.

You can get ideas from competitors from here. You can 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 are most beneficial for your brand. How are you planning on staying active? How do you 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. In addition, it should work with 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 for 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 wants and likes to see on each platform, you can effectively reach your goals.

5. Staying Organized and Consistent

This 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:

• Mailchimp
• Hootsuite
• SproutSocial
• Clickup
• Planable
• Meta Business Suite

With these platforms, you can look at your social analytics and plan content based on what you find. 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 tactics such as the 80/20 rule. It focuses on making 80% of the content entertaining, educational, and exciting, while the other 20% focuses on your business’s services or products.

Still not sure how to get started? The Misfits are here to help! Ring our bell and let’s get started.