7 simple steps in creating a social media strategy

7 simple steps in creating a social media strategy

Now, I sometimes feel like a broken record always talking about why you’re on social media and understanding why having a strategy is important. Today I thought I’d talk about how to in 7 simple steps create a social media strategy. Focusing on why and how you’re on social media .How you can do that in 7 simple steps, how you can do that in under 10 minutes.

Step One

Why are you on social media, are you looking to get leads, are you looking to build a brand, or are you looking to drive traffic back to your website. That’s most important, you really need to understand why, so that you can measure. Determine whether or not the why is successful for you.

Step Two

Defining your target market. It’s really important because in particular you are on Facebook,  you can advertise to your target market. To people with specific interest, specific hobbies, specific marital status or age groups. It’s really, really important to have that profile of you ideal client/customer. The profile might be for example you might have a target market of women, 26 years old, single, interested in healthy eating and enjoys exercising. That’s a specific target market of who you can attend or attract in social media. Step number two is really being clear about who that target market is.

Step Three

Even more simple because now you understand who they are, you can actually go to the social media platform that they’re actually on.Working with the social media demographics. For example, Facebook has over 1.4 billion people and their audience is always growing and changing. Twitter mostly has an audience of 25 to 44 years old, however that’s increasing to the older demographic and mostly it’s business so lot’s of lead generation sales, e.g the posts are short links, referring to an affiliate product,click here, buy this or read this, sending traffic back to a website. Instagram is a channel for followers to actually get people to your website, so it’s a one click link in your bio and over 50% of the Instagram users are between the age of 18 and 29.

Google plus, Google is a different platform but potentially male and also those that are interested in business. Pinterest is predominantly females and females that spend over an hour pinning to their boards. LinkedIn is a great channel for recruiting and also for business to business networking. Snapchat which has recently overtaken Twitter is a great place to actually give snapshots or very, very small sections of a part of your business.
How do you build your audience, in order to build your audience you need to actually spend some time, so just recently I took my own advice and started spending some time on Instagram. Once I started spending time connecting I doubled my followers within two weeks. One of my clients went from 3200 followers to 32000 in under a week, just by adding a different hashtag. What I’m finding now which is really cool is I’m actually getting celebrity status people with 60,000 plus followers following little old me which is quite humbling.
I’ve also been sending them a message saying thanks for following and they’ve been responding by saying that your content is great. Define who your target market is then go ahead and seek those that already have your audience. You might like to join a few groups on Facebook and LinkedIn and hang out with those people.

Step Four

Find your content, so there is so much content out there and if you’re on Facebook you should really think about doing Facebook live events to build your content or to include into your content strategy, why? Because when you do a video, and a Facebook live video Facebook is actually giving kudos to those people that are using it and are actually pushing your video higher in the algorithm. Initially you might see a 100 or so people watch your video and then after a while you’ll actually see over 4/500 people viewing it, then you can actually boost that post as well.
What I have been doing and I’ll share a little secret because we all know that business people are extremely time poor is I do a live video like this one, and then I send it off to a website called rev.com.  I  get them to transcribe the videos, so now I have a blog post, a post blog on my website,(which is what this blog post is from) I add this video into the blog post (see below) then I send that out to my newsletter and out to different social media sites like LinkedIn and Twitter and Instagram, Snapchat and Pinterest.
That’s just one strategy that you can do, but when I talk about content, think about blog posts, quotes, tips if you’re in the exercise Personal Trainer environment with clients that I coach. You could actually be doing exercises and showing people how to do exercises, so that’s really cool as well. The most important thing about your content is that it should be entertaining, engaging and authentic. People want to see and build a relationship with you, not some false perfect video, so it’s important to have it as authentic as you are, it needs to be entertaining and engaging, so think about that for your content.

Step Five

Tools,  you can use insights on Facebook, Twitter has it’s own analytics, you’ve got Google analytics as well, you can get some software like Agro Pulse, Social Sprout  and Buffer and all those sort of paid softwares can give you insights to where your traffic and how your postings are going. If you’re on Instagram you can turn your Instagram account now into a business profile, and you’ve got insights on that, so you can see which pictures are working the best for you and the reach of those as well.

Step Six

Building a relationship with your audience, so what is the relationship? That’s said and done, isn’t it, a relationship is when two people build and communicate and create a friendship or create a business friendship or create a customer service friendship, whatever it is for you, but build a relationship with your people.

I’m just helping my son at the moment create a new business and we were talking about relationships and what he would give to them in regards to social media content, I said to him, everything that you know, the information that you have, you would share on  social media, don’t hold back because your clients or your potential clients will actually get on Google and find it from somebody else. Build the relationships and then when you’ve created that relationship, your audience, so your potential audience are more likely to buy from you then.

Step Seven

Influencers, how we’re actually tracking and measuring, so you really need to have an idea of your goals, so if your own that build traffic, or build leads, or build sales, or branding or whatever, then you need to be able to track that to make sure that it works for you. Try using Google analytics, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, they all have their own tracking and measuring or you can go out and buy platforms like I just mentioned.

It’s important to track your goals

It’s important to track your goals because otherwise you don’t know whether it’s working. What I found with most business owners is that they say yeah, that social media stuff doesn’t really work, and I normally say, “Well how do you know that? If you’re not tracking your results and you’re not looking at your leads and your sales and your increasing in likes, well how do you know it’s not working?” Make sure that you track and measure your results.
Methods for analytics, so I’ll just delve into this a little bit further. Like I said, Twitter has your own Twitter Analytics, you’ve got Facebook insights for your Ads as well. LinkedIn you have to do it manually so you sort of have to gauge how many people are connecting with you. You can go to different forum analytics, you can use Instagram, now has a little insights on Instagram and Pinterest if you sign up for Pinterest business account you can get analytics from that.

Let’s just recap in under 10 minutes with today’s social media minute.

To do your social media strategy you should:

1. Define your goals and why?
2. Look at your target audience definitely even if you do service everybody you should niche it down just for social media.
3. Pick which appropriate channels.
4. Define what content you’re going to share and how often you’re going to share that,
5. Tools to help you, one of the tools that I love is Meet Edgar because I can schedule when I post.
6. Building those relationships
7. Tracking and measuring.

That’s it for today’s social media minute, I hope that you spend the next 10 minutes working out your social media strategy.
That’s it from me, if you like the video turned into a blog and you know of any businesses, don’t forget to share this with them, leave me a comment below if you’ve got any questions and I’ll definitely answer them.

If you would love to become a social media manager, then we offer Certificate III (Qld only) Funded and all other areas of Australia Certificate IV, get more information on our nationally accredited courses here.