4 Steps to Easily Create a Social Media Strategy for Your Business

When you’re just starting out with social media, the sheer number of social platforms and avenues can make your task seem daunting. That’s why you need to create a social media strategy.

By making a strategy specific to your business, you save yourself time and make sure your efforts are most impactful. Follow these 4 steps to get started:

1. Define Your Goals

What is your purpose for creating social media profiles for your business?
Asking yourself this question will help you determine which social channels are right for you and make you more successful in the long run.

• Is your goal to teach followers something?
• Share industry news?
• Interact with followers as a means of customer service?
• Share photos and videos from your business?
• A combo of 2 or more of these items? Etc.?

2. Find Your Target Audience on Social Media

Each social media platform appeals to different users, so finding the platforms that are most in line with your business’s target audience will help you have the biggest impact.

Here’s a great article that describes how each social media platform is used and who uses them.

3. Plan Your Content

Now, that you know which social platforms you will post on, you need to figure out what you will actually say/share when you do post.

Decide on a schedule for when you will post, then create content to share on those days/times.

4. Test Your Effectiveness

Many social platforms give you analytics tools that will help you to understand how many people your posts are reaching, who likes or comments on them, what times of day your followers are online, etc. Take advantage of these analytics.

Look at what times your posts get the most likes, etc. and cater your posting to schedule to conform to the time your followers are responding.

Testing your effectiveness is a process, try different types of posts, different times, etc. to see when your posts are the most successful and then follow your results!

What’s the Best Use of Your Social Media Marketing Dollars?

With what seems like hundreds of options, are you wondering how to spend the social media marketing dollars you’ve allocated? This article is for you.

We’ll guide you through the decision-making process so that you can spend your money in a way that is going to be most beneficial to your business.

Your Three Step Social Media Marketing Guide:

1. Figure Out Which Social Platform You Have the Biggest Impact On

As a small business in 2015, you realize your business pretty much has to have some sort of presence online, but creating a presence that will be influential in the marketplace is a whole different story. Part of building up your presence is deciding how to spend your marketing dollars.

You need to decide which social platform you’ve organically had the most success on or decide which platform can best be used to showcase your business products/services.

For example, a retail store will be consistently getting new products. This would be a great opportunity to photograph those new products and share them with customers on social media. This type of business would do well on an image based platform like Instagram or Facebook.

With a smaller social media marketing budget it is going to be most beneficial to spend on one (maybe two) social media platform so you get the most bang for your buck. Once you decide which platform your business has the best impact on, that is going to be the one where you spend the marketing dollars.

Need some more in depth help deciding which platform will be best for your business?  Check out our previous article about the different social media channels.

2. Create a Plan With Specific Goals

Now that you know which social media platform you’ll spend on, now you need to decide how exactly you’re going to spend…I.E. what do you want to get out of your marketing dollars?

Let’s take a look at an example using Facebook because it has some of the most avenues in which you can spend your money. On this platform, you may want to increase your business page “Likes,” run an advert for a specific audience, or promote a specific post.

Choosing one of these things and setting the amount you’ll spend will let you track the progress of your social media marketing.

Having a specific goal in mind for your social media marketing dollars is going to make seeing a return on your investment that much more clear.

3. Test Different Content Styles and Times

Hopefully you get a return on your first social media spend, but don’t be discouraged if you don’t immediately see results.

Testing a few different social media posts is best so that you can see which one your customers respond to. As marketers, we may be sure one thing is going to work with the audience, but when it goes live it doesn’t get the desired response, while a different social media campaign gets a great result we weren’t expecting.

When you craft a social media campaign always have a few different choices for wording, images, offers, etc. in order to test what works for your audience. Often, the results will surprise you.