5 Steps to Create a Successful Social Media Strategy

Social media marketing consumes a lot of time & resources and without a plan in form of a social media strategy, your efforts may bear no fruits.

If you are continuously promoting content on social media channels with little to no results, it’s time to recreate your social media strategy.

Have you ever thought of creating an effective social media strategy for your blog or business?

With an effective strategy in hand, you will have a plan to execute.

So, what exactly is a social media strategy?

A detailed plan that defines all of the social media marketing goals, and projects. It basically summarizes what you’re going to achieve, who is your ideal audience and how to grow your business over the competitors.

Let’s break it down further.

Five Important Steps To Create An Successful Social Media Strategy

Let’s get down to the important steps to create a successful social media strategy for your small business or blog.

1. Conduct a current social media audit

Before you sketch out a plan for social media marketing, determine where you are. A social media audit will help you identify what tactics are working and what’s not working on each channel. A few things to consider when doing the social media audit are;

•  What social media channels bring more engagement?
• The type of content that gets maximum shares.
•  How frequently you post content on all social media channels?
• Do you get results on paid social media advertising campaigns?
• Are your social channels properly optimized?
•  What are your current weekly, and monthly statistics on each social media channel?
•  Which networks get you website clicks?
• If people are clicking on your website, do they convert to sign-ups or customers?

Use this step to determine the current statistics of your social media. Most importantly, you also need to consider whether a specific channel is suitable for your business or not.

Let’s say you have an online store that sells cat foods and you use twitter every day in the hope to get new buyers. But, you don’t really get anything in return. Because twitter is not the suitable marketing channel for your cat products. Stop using twitter right away and divert all your focus to other channels where you get more response.

Social media is a marketing tool for many business owners. Several bloggers make money by promoting their content on social media. The key is to find the right platform and stick to it.

2. Research your social media audience

It’s obvious that we need to bring our businesses in front of the ideal customers. But, the question is how to research and find the right audience on social media?

The easiest way is to create an audience persona. Marketers, business owners, and bloggers should collect data from the audience on a regular basis. You can use survey forms, quizzes, polls, and instant Q/A to have a clear understanding of your audience.

Furthermore, it’s important to do demographic research on different social media channels. It lets you create, and formulate content strategy according to their interests, and likeness.

Spend time in reading the demographics by visiting the analytic or insight tab of each social media channel. Prepare a spreadsheet and record all of your audience data.

The key here is to market your products to the correct audience. But, the strategy can fail if you’re targeting a wrong audience.

3.Create and Curate Engaging Content

The content is the fuel for your social media. I think it’s worth spending the time to create and curate engaging content for your social media audience. When you have got an ideal audience, they expect more from you. They want you to keep them updated, informed and entertained.

We all consume social media for interesting, educating and entertaining content. Your content should have captivating details that invite users to leave a comment, give a thumbs up and share it.

You could consider following types of content;

Images
Short videos
Blog Posts
Updates
News
Statistics
Interviews
Results
Text posts
Polls
GIFs/Memes
Curated content from other sites

Curated content should be used to fill the gaps in your content calendar. But, the content needs to be accurate, up to date and of high quality. You should aim to increase your knowledge on a specific subject in front of your social media audience.

Here are top ways to find new content ideas for your blog and social media audience.

I strongly recommend you to focus on engagement and building relationship with readers on social media. All efforts go in vain when your audience doesn’t make the engagement.

You may also read: 9 Tools to help you manage your social media accounts.

4. Build a content plan and schedule

The next step is to build a content calendar that outlines content ideas you will share, how often you will post content to each network and the timings to share. A calendar basically explains all of your social media content and the posting schedule.

I would suggest experimenting content ideas on different timings and days to find out the audience response.

Investing in a social media scheduling tool will automate content posting at the right time. It saves up your time and shows your content at the peak times. The analytic features of scheduling tools is definitely a plus.

5.Track and analyze your efforts

This is the final most important step to succeed in formulating an effective social media strategy for your business. Even best marketers practice trial and errors to get better results.

The process starts with tracking the results, study the data and then adding tweaks to make tactics more effective. You should often re-evaluate all these steps to get the better results for your social media marketing.

Establishing an effective social media strategy is a constant process that requires changes when necessary.

Understand your audience, and figure out how your content performs on social media channels. Take a look at your competitor’s social platforms and the content they share. You should also keep the importance of consistency on social media. Nobody likes to interact, or engage with an outdated social media profile. Make yourself available on most engaged social channels and create an effective social media strategy to grow your business.

What steps would you like to add?

Share in the comments below.

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• Social Media Marketing for Moving Companies in 2021
• 8 Tips to Step up your Social Media Game in 2019 and Beyond
• 5 Steps to Employer Branding and Reputation Management on Social Media

Arfa is a passionate blogger at She Means Blogging who helps other aspiring bloggers grow and expand their small businesses. She knows how to attract readers to her blog through impressive content. Other than blogging, she usually writes for freelance clients and businesses. You can also connect with her on LinkedIn  for more blogging adventures.