September 5, 2020
Marketing your business on social media may seem like a simple task. After all, it’s just creating posts and commenting to people, right?
If that were the case, there would be no job title “Social Media Manager” or any role positioned around the task. The truth of the matter is that social media management/marketing (referred to as SMM) is indeed a full-time job. If a business drops the ball, it’s most likely because they underestimated the power of these tools.
To save you trouble, here are some of the top tips today for developing and running a social media marketing strategy today:
It is critical to choose goals that are closely aligned with your business objectives. This is the first step to creating a winning strategy that will see you to success. You must set a baseline first to measure your return on investment (ROI) in this space.
Therefore, it is imperative that prior to posting a thing on your social channels, you have set down and written out some concrete and established goals.
When listing out your business objectives, remember to keep it S.M.A.R.T. which means:
Every goal should be guided by these tenets. One example of a S.M.A.R.T. goal is:
“We will use Facebook this quarter for customer support and lower the average response rate by under 2 hours.”
Once everything is set up, you need to decide which numbers to watch.
Look at the goals laid out and this should help to determine the types of metrics you need to measure. For the example above, the first (and most obvious) metric to watch is the response rate.
Don’t look at what is called “vanity” metrics. These are figures of the ego and pertain to things like “number of followers” or “likes.” Both of those have little impact on the bottom line. Instead, consider analyzing more valuable metrics like:
It’s possible you may want to track different goals for separate networks. For example, if you use Twitter to drive traffic to your website, it makes sense to measure click-throughs there. If you advertise on Facebook, the metric to track should be cost-per-click. So, it all depends on where and what you are doing.
When social media goals align with your overall marketing strategies, it’s easier to assign value to actions.
Once the goals and baseline metrics are established, it’s time to make a plan. Since goals will vary across platforms, content needs to match the audience.
That means you can’t get lazy and simply post the same content everywhere, all the time. People will notice and it will cause them to distrust you. After all, if you can’t be bothered with your own content how can you help solve their problems?
When creating a channel plan, there are several universal components. These include:
Following these simple guidelines ensures you are ready to get started.
In Volume 1 of Social Media Marketing Tips, we’ve looked over setting goals, setting baseline metrics, and creating a plan. All of this is still in the organizational phase. Up next, we’ll talk about how to optimize the content you are posting and keep the audience engaged!
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