A social media strategy is a detailed master plan that answers the what, when, how, and why questions for all content posted on your company’s social pages. It involves more than just tweeting and liking photos. There must be a well-thought-out plan behind what you’re posting, as well as a goal that you hope to achieve as a result of it. This type of marketing strategy, like any other strategy, is developed long before you begin creating. It’s a strategy, defined as a collection of ideas, a goal, and the path to achieving that goal.
Consider the moment you decided to start your own small business. You don’t just open your doors the next day – there’s lots of planning and strategizing that goes into it, and it’s the same with each new step you take toward building your company.
So, what exactly is included in a social media strategy, and how does it benefit your marketing efforts?
A strategy is an integral part of achieving your goals in social media marketing. It requires a commitment to understanding your audience, what they want, how their demands align with your objectives, and how you can incentivize them with a deal that gets them on board with your business.
Some of the questions that must be asked and addressed before beginning to strategize future social media campaigns are as follows: who your audience is, how you want your brand to be perceived, what type of brand content you wish to share, what social platforms are you planning on using, and what are the goals you want to achieve.
It is crucial to acknowledge that you can have multiple social media objectives.
How To Grow a Social Media Audience In 2022
1) Analyze Social Media Channels
You could use social media to help generate more leads, communicate product information, increase brand awareness, expand your network, or do anything that will help your company connect with customers.
Furthermore, depending on the nature of the platform, you could develop different strategies for different social media platforms. For example, you could use Facebook to generate new leads, Instagram to share visually appealing content, and YouTube to share educational videos.
This article will look at some ways to grow your social media audience. Let us dive right in.
Before developing a comprehensive social media strategy, you should examine the channels your company is currently using, underutilizing, or completely ignoring. If your company’s brand is only on Facebook, but all the action is on Twitter, the first step toward online success is determining where your efforts are best spent. Similarly, if your brand is relatively active on Instagram and receiving good but not great engagement, you know where to focus and engage in your efforts in a more targeted manner.
If you’re looking at using some of the best Instagram growth service companies to improve engagement, always do some research first. Verify their legitimacy and look for reliable and honest reviews before choosing a service.
2) Have Clear Goals
There is no one-size-fits-all solution. Given that each company’s business goals are unique, their social media strategy will also be unique. Defining your social media business goals early on will save you time in the long run. Is it your intention to expand your audience? Become a leader in a specific social media community? What will the social media approval process entail, and how many layers will there be between ideation and publication?
Before wasting time exploring each platform, define your goals as the first step in your social media strategy. After that, learn how each forum works and conduct test posts to determine where and when your content receives the most engagement from your audience. From there, you’ll be able to decide which channels are the most profitable for your end goals and business needs.
Tip: Not every social media strategy has to result in monetary gain or more customers for your company. It’s also okay if your goals are lead and prospect-focused. Other objectives could include educating your audience, informing a community, receiving consumer insights, or establishing your brand perception.
3) Identify Your Audience
It’s time to identify your existing and targeted audiences as you define your social strategy goals. Find out your target audience and curate content for them, whether you use personas or actual customer data. If you’re marketing to millennials, you should know that “college students” and “high schoolers” aren’t your target demographic – the youngest millennials will be 25 in 2021. So, in your social media posts, make sure you know whom you’re trying to reach.
Buyer personas are semi-fictional, data-driven representations of your target consumer. Defining a buyer persona for your company can help focus your time on qualified prospects, guide product development to meet the needs and goals of your target customers, and ensure that all work across your organization is coordinated (from marketing to sales to service). As a result, you’ll be able to attract high-value visitors, leads, and customers to your organization, whom you will be much more likely to keep over time.
More specifically, having a thorough understanding of your buyer persona(s) is essential for driving content creation, product development, sales follow-up, and anything else related to customer acquisition and retention.
Most effective buyer personas are based on market research, and insights gleaned from your existing customer base (through surveys, interviews, etc.) They assist you in better understanding your customers (and prospective customers). This makes it easier to tailor your content, messaging, product development, and services to your target audience members’ specific needs, behaviors, and concerns.
Depending on your industry, you may have as few as one or two personas or as many as ten or twenty. However, if you’re new to personas, start small; you can always create more personas later if necessary.
4) Create Strong Brand Presence
Building your social profiles and social strategy requires a strong brand presence. Potential customers will feel lost or uncertain about the brand they’re interacting with if your company’s brand doesn’t have brand images and profile pictures that genuinely say, “this is who we are.” Make this abundantly clear. This way, when people see your logo, they immediately recognize who you are. Who exactly are you?
Have a unified brand voice in addition to imagery and visuals that speak to your brand persona. Whether it’s a word, a catchphrase, or an exceptional commitment to staying up to date on social issues and current events, ensure your brand voice is consistent and mirrored across all social platforms.
5) Create Attractive Content
When creating your social media workflow, consider what types of content you want to make. Social media posts are great, but you’ll need to vary the types of posts you publish based on your audience and the platform you use. LinkedIn content will most likely take the form of longer-form written posts. On the other hand, Twitter posts are short burst tweets that may or may not include images. Determine the content type, length, and add-ons (for example, videos, GIFs, emojis, and photos) and begin there.
After that, you can experiment with different content types and become more creative. After creating a single piece of content, you can repurpose it into various content types, including infographics, standalone images, and short-form videos.
Infographics are an excellent tool for companies because they allow you to rework longer-form blogs or text posts into something more visually appealing and easy to disseminate. Similarly, using images and short videos is another way to add a visual component to the mix.
Other content types to consider include polls, question posts, contests, and incentives. Poll and question posts can be found on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. People enjoy expressing their thoughts and answering yes/no questions. Ask consumers to vote for their choice or share their opinions or recommendations on something. People enjoy talking and, even more so, sharing their thoughts on important issues. So don’t be afraid to ask. User-generated content is an excellent way to solicit audience assistance on projects or initiatives while providing incentives.
6) Use Hashtags Effectively
Once you’ve established your brand’s social personality, you can explore more niche areas of the internet. You should focus on areas where you might be able to rely on hashtags for keywords your audience is searching for.
When brands begin to use keywords relevant to their audience and niche, they can reach a more hyper-specific audience and assist people in finding information, news, and content from their brand. Brands can use trends if they are relevant to a larger brand initiative.
If you’re a tech company rather than a highly nuanced brand like a greeting card company, an excellent place to start is to look at what’s trending on Twitter, Instagram, and more business-focused sites such as LinkedIn. All three of these social media platforms rely heavily on hashtags as content fuel, and it’s a good idea to examine posts that are performing well (high engagement, likes, and comments) to see what works and what doesn’t.
You can also use hashtag generators, which can help you come up with industry-specific hashtags based on your preferred keywords. This is usually a feature offered by organic growth service companies like Nitreo. Services like this are usually subscription-based, but there are discounts you can get from partner sites like this one that includes a Nitreo review and coupon offers.
Start small: whenever you post something on your social media accounts, try to include some hashtags – even if it’s only two or three. These small signals will bring people to your social media accounts and, depending on what you get to the consumer’s table, may turn them into site visitors.
7) Link Social Media To Your Website and Build Relationships
Making sure you’re visible everywhere is one of the simplest ways to increase your social media visibility. At the bottom of your website landing pages, do you have social media links? You make it even more difficult for users to contact you outside of your email newsletter list if you don’t. Customers and prospects may like to browse social platforms to see how active and engaged your brand is – and this could be the difference between choosing your product over a competitor’s product.
Make sure to include links to all of your social media accounts in your website’s header, sidebar, or footer – somewhere prominent and easily accessible. Also, ensure that the links are correct and open to your social profiles. Another simple addition is to include social sharing buttons in your website content. This way, visitors can share as they read. Make it as simple and as comprehensible as possible for people to share your blogs on Twitter or your awesome video on Instagram stories. The easier it is to share your content, the more likely it is that people will share it.
The most critical factor in developing a valuable audience is engagement. Having 1000 followers who regularly engage with you and your content is far more valuable than having 10,000 who ignore you. You can post content indefinitely, but your account will struggle to grow if you don’t interact with your followers. Engage customers by interacting with them, responding to their responses, and reaching out to them first.
Additionally, never, ever buy followers. A vanity metric such as follower count may feel nice, but it’s all a sham. Allow your content to speak for itself and reach followers without deceiving the algorithm into believing you have more followers than you do. Maintain your integrity and seek out a real audience.
8) Post Consistently and Create Personalized Content
Nothing is unappealing than a brand with a social media profile that never posts. Having a social profile is meaningless unless you use it, and brands with social platforms that never post are perceived as out of touch or “old school.” Use social media monitoring software to help you maintain a consistent posting schedule and create a comprehensive social media calendar.
Maintain regular, consistent posting, whether this is once or twice a week or more frequently. This will let your audience know you’re thinking about them when developing your social media strategy.
Consider resharing and repurposing older content types if you don’t have anything new to say or share. Retweet and repost other people’s content, especially that of your customers. People will notice even if you post a generic “hi!” message, and you will find yourself with a more engaged audience.
People will not feel compelled to engage with your content if you do not include a human element. As a result, brands must engage in both reactive and proactive ways. Don’t just throw out a silly GIF or a heartfelt text post and hope for the best.
Being proactive on social media channels is one of the fundamental concepts of social selling success, and it is critical for developing personal connections with prospects, which leads us to our next point. When you’re proactive, you’re the one who strikes up a conversation with people who may be talking about you but haven’t necessarily sent you messages. When you’re reactive, you respond to direct messages, mentions, or comments.
Conclusion
A social media strategy guides your marketing efforts. A well-planned social media strategy guides you in the right direction, whether you’re creating new content, responding to someone, writing a caption, or creating a lead generation campaign. You may need to adjust your strategy from time to time to keep up with changing trends. Developing an effective social media strategy from the start provides a solid foundation for your marketing campaigns to grow your business.
How Pressfarm can help
For an entrepreneur, overcoming a crisis can determine your success or failure. At Pressfarm, we help companies define the right narrative in the media for their brand – either to improve their credibility or resolve a PR crisis. If you are an entrepreneur wondering how to improve your company’s publicity, get in touch with us. We can help you to craft and distribute your press releases, develop compelling guest posts and design eye-catching media kits for your brand.
Learn why we are good at what we do from our customer success stories.