Everyone knows that social media is an essential part of marketing in the digital era. How exactly to be successful at it has been a minefield of opinion, hyperbole, ignorance, and actual good advice.
In a bid to save you the time and money that others–myself included–have wasted over the last eight or so years, I’m going to spend today’s post relaying the few bits of solid, time-tested, general best practices of social media marketing strategy.
Social Media Marketing Strategy Essentials
If there is one thing I’ve learned it’s that these essentials can take you a long way. After practicing them for a while, they can even help you determine what kind of professional help you might need in the future.
1. Know Your Brand (And Craft a Brand Story)
This is accomplished by discovering your deepest held values (as an individual or group of individuals) and then mapping those values onto your brand. These become identity markers that others, like your audience, can latch onto. Eventually allowing a group of strangers with shared values to coalesce into a loyal tribe.
The extreme importance of this step cannot be over-stated, but it is often ignored and supplanted entirely by simple lists of best practices like this one.
2. Know Who Your Target Audience Is
Knowing your target audience may sound like simple advice, but so many people get this wrong. A lot of individuals and companies simply decide who their target audience is arbitrarily (based on their own wants) and then prescribe to that audience what they think it wants to hear. Or, equally as ineffective, what they want that audience to hear. This is misguided.
Instead, you should build on what you learned by putting our first step into practice.
Your target audience is a type of person who emerges, not a group of people you arbitrarily choose.
Aside from sharing the values from which you have chosen to speak from, as a whole they may not conform to any one social group, norm, or construct you’re familiar with. So before you can know your who your ideal audience really is, you have to be true to the values that will attract them.
3. Set Clear Goals
I recommend beginning that process by writing down some clear goals. At what rate would you like to grow you followers, subscribers, fans, etc.? How many comments would you like to generate? How many shares across various networks? What kind of traffic, engagement, purchases, etc. do you want your social activity to result in?
Knowing those things will help you measure the success of each social media effort/experiment you might try. It will also provide a gauge as to how much time and effort is actually required in order to get the desired effect. Which will help you adopt and develop efficient practices where you need them.
4. Find The Platforms Your Target Audience is Using (And Start Using Them)
This essential best practice is closely linked with #2 – Knowing Your Audience. As you produce, publish, and track content with analytics you may notice traffic and activity coming from places you did not expect. Take the time to learn about those platforms (how they work, what the etiquette is, etc.) and expand your efforts in that arena.
5. Create a Schedule
But you can (and probably should) create a schedule for everything involving your content publishing and time spent on social sites. This will help you establish consistency and (hopefully) prevent you from getting sucked into “social media black holes” where you spend hours on a network and nothing is actually accomplished.
6. Draw Insights From Analytics
Whether you’re using a link shortening service, Google Analytics, Hootsuite, some other form of analytics, or all of the above–making data based decision is just plain smarter than not doing it. This data is a direct reflection of how your content is being received, how people are interacting with it, and holds clues as to what you can do to achieve the ideal results. It may feel intimidating at first, but it’s worth it. Take the time to become familiar with an analytics platform of your choosing and squeeze all of the insights you can out of it.
7. Iterate & Repeat
It is the definition of insanity to do the same thing over and over expecting different results. The same goes for social media marketing. You cannot expect the exact same tactic that hasn’t been working to all of a sudden work if only you repeat it often enough. Take all of the essentials above and as you receive data from your analytics (and audience feedback) tweak your strategy to reflect what you’ve learned. Then repeat.
Conclusion
When it comes to creating a social media marketing strategy there are certain essential elements to the process. The first and foremost is forming a solid brand persona based on the values that make you/your company tick. The next one is learning to recognize the audience that emerges (those who respond positively) when you speak (create content) based on those values. This part of the process will look different for everyone.
After the first two, which are more or less pre-requisites, things become a bit more standardized. It’s important to set clear social media goals, use (and understand) the most relevant platforms, stay consistent with a schedule and learn from the resulting data. After you’ve done all that, cycle back through and adjust things as you go.