Creating a Social Media Plan
In today’s technology-driven, app-crazy, and influencer frenzy world, it can feel hard to keep up. You’ll want to begin utilizing social media to positively impact your business. Now, you might be wondering, “Where do I start?” Luckily, you’ve found us, and we are going to give you a simple play-by-play on how to create the perfect social media plan for your company.
Establish Goals and Objectives for Your Business
Sit down and ask yourself this question: “What is my brand's mission?” This is the first step in helping to set your business goals and objectives. Once you have decided on these, it’s time to decide what you want to achieve from utilizing social media. Is it to increase awareness? Expand your brand's audience? Generate sales? Boost community engagement? Or are you trying to drive more traffic to your site? These are just some of the things your business may want to achieve from utilizing social media. These goals can help you determine which social media platforms are best for your biz and leverage social media effectively.
Know Your Target Audience
Next, take the time to get to know your target audience. This step is vital to the success of your social media plan. Knowing who your ideal customers are and what social platforms they are utilizing is crucial. For example, if your business is targeting millennials – Instagram may be one of the platforms you make a priority. However, if your product is geared more towards business-oriented professionals – LinkedIn should be your focus. If you already have business social media accounts created, it’s time to research your existing audience and how they interact with you. Remember, don’t spread yourself too thin by creating an account on every platform. Instead, focus on those platforms where your primary audience is.
Create a Social Media Marketing Content Calendar
Your social media content calendar is going to be the backbone of your social media strategy. This tool will allow you to stay organized, plan ahead, and ensure fresh, consistent content. This is where you can keep up with which campaigns your business is running this month, what holiday events you may be advertising, and more! Your content calendar should be unique to your company. If you are using social media management tools to automatically post for you, make sure it aligns with your content calendar. Your calendar should include what content you are posting, which platform you are posting on, what time you should post it, and any images, videos, text, or links. This way, when the time comes for you to share an update on your social channels, you and your team are ready!
Social Media Metrics
As you are putting together your company’s social media plan, you will need to decide what metrics are most important to your brand. Then, track, analyze, and improve them. Keeping track of important metrics will allow you to know what works and what does not. Most social media platforms will allow you to navigate your page’s analytics. For Facebook, they are in the Insights tab. For Twitter, go to Twitter Analytics. And if you have a business account, Instagram does a good job of summarizing your content data for each post. While at first, this may be a trial-and-error situation, examining the real-time metrics of your campaigns can allow you to change your social media plans as you go.
Some of the most common and valuable metrics to pay attention to are engagement, impressions, reach, referrals, conversions, share of voice, and reply time.
- Engagement: Likes, comments, shares, clicks, retweets, mentions, etc.
- Impressions: How many times your post shows up in someone’s timeline
- Reach: Total number of people who see your content
- Referrals: How a user lands on your website
- Conversions: When a visitor from your social channel purchases something from your site
- Share of Voice: Measures the brand exposure based on social media conversation
- Reply Time: How long it takes you to reply to your audience on any given platform
Create Engaging Social Content
Let’s talk about social media content. It’s important to stick to your company’s brand. You want your theme throughout your social platforms to stay true to you, like your “Instagram grid” should have an identifiable and cohesive aesthetic. More importantly, though, you want your followers to interact with you, and there are several ways of achieving this. Creating polls on your favorite platforms is a sure way to get your audience involved and a great way to learn a little more about them. One of the best ways to engage with someone is to ask them questions.
Also, it’s vital to stay up to date on all the social media trends. Is a certain song viral on TikTok right now? Hop on that movement and create an engaging TikTok video about your product or brand. Then, share it to the reels on Instagram for increased exposure. Overall, remind your audience that there are humans behind your posts. Content that shows off your company’s “human side” will help you connect with your followers more than anything.
Never undervalue the power of a social media plan! In today’s world, a strong social media presence is vital to any company’s success. If you have any questions about curating a social media plan for your business, contact us!