Creating A Social Media Plan
Create Social Media Profiles
This chapter will give you the basics of planning and executing your social media strategy. If you have not yet done so, start by creating your business profiles on your chosen social media platforms.
Here are some tips to keep in mind:
– You don’t need to be active across all social media platforms, only those primarily used by your target market. Start with only one or two. You can increase them later unless you have the resources to do more than two right now.
– Use unique and consistent names for your profile names, while ensuring that they are easy to link back to your business name.
– Use these unique profile names consistently across all platforms.
Social Media ‘Follow-Us’ Buttons
Link your business website and blog to your social media profiles. To do this, you simply add Fасеbооk and LinkedIn buttons, for example, on your website. Your website visitors will see these buttons, and this will enable them to follow you on those social media networks.
Social Media Sharing Buttons
Ensure that you have social media ‘Like’ and ‘Share’ buttons on your website blog and other pages. This will enable your website visitors to share your content with their friends and followers on their social media profiles.
Let’s use Facebook as an example:
– When a visitor to your website enjoys one of your blog posts, they will click the ‘Like’ button on this page on your website.
– This article can then be posted onto the visitor’s Facebook wall, for their network of friends and followers to see.
– Some of those friends and followers will then click on the link to see what their friend liked. If they also like your content, they might join the conversation that you started on your blog.
– If they, in turn, also ‘like’ the post on Facebook, we have the beginnings of a chain reaction, where their friends will also see the shared link, and may also visit your website.
This is how your website, blog or social media posts can ‘go viral’, but this isn’t the true objective. The most meaningful benefit is a group of people (regardless of size) engaging in a conversation that you have started. This is not based on the size of your company or revenue, but rather on the quality of your thoughts and ideas.
“Effective social media presence isn’t just about being present; it’s about the deliberate orchestration of content, strategically crafted to captivate, engage, and leave a lasting impression on every scroll.” – KK Diaz
Your Social Media Plan
Next, we delve into the planning that transforms mere presence into impactful influence. In this section, we explore the art of deliberate content orchestration, guiding you through the steps to captivate, engage, and leave a lasting impression in the digital sphere.
Follow the six basic steps outlined below to plan and execute your social media strategy.
Step 1: Preplanning
You implement a social media plan to support your business goals. To ensure that you do this effectively, you need to ask and answer the following key questions:
· Have we segmented our target market, and have we determined each buyer persona within each segment?
This will help you to answer questions about the key attributes of your target market, including their location (where are they based?), demographic (who are they?) and psychographic information (what are their concerns, goals and aspirations?).
· What desired results are our customers hoping to gain from our products and services? Knowing this will help you to better understand what influences your target market’s decisions, in terms of what they would value about your social media presence.
· Where and how do our customers generally access key information about our industry, products, best practices, events and other educational content?
Knowing this will help you to source content that you can share with your followers and what content to create to differentiate you.
· Do we have at least one opt–in automated sales funnel to help generate and qualify leads? Knowing this will help you to implement the sales infrastructure to support your social media marketing activities. Without this, your social media efforts will be in vain.
Step 2: Observing
Observe and take note of what your direct competitors, non–competing brands and individual influencers are doing to succeed in:
· the way that they use their social media profiles;
· interacting with their fans and followers;
· what they post and how frequently; and
· the promotions they run.
In this way, you can see how you can differentiate yourself.
Step 3 Goal Setting
You need to set specific and realistic goals regarding what you want to achieve, based on your observations and the resources you have at your disposal. Some of these goals would include;
· the positioning you want to establish in the minds of your followers;
· the type of brand experience you want to create;
· the main objective you want to achieve (increasing brand awareness vs generating leads); and
· the type, quality and quantity of leads you want to generate.
Step 4: Creating and Executing
You are now ready to establish your social media calendar to help guide:
· the type of content you will post;
· the specific days for posting content; and
· the source of your content and resources required.
The key is to be consistent, intentional, authentic, credible and helpful to your customers. You must have a reasonable response time to questions and comments. Focus on connecting and giving value before selling, and establish yourself as an authority and/or a thought–leader in your industry. You do this by:
· sharing useful information and insight from your company and other external sources;
· participating in industry forums and events;
· creating and sharing human experiences; and
· reaching out to strangers and starting conversations.
TIP
Ensure that you establish a social media policy and rules of engagement to guide how you and your team conduct yourselves, both as brand custodians in a professional capacity and as brand ambassadors in a personal capacity.
Step 5: Measuring and reporting
Measuring how your social media activities perform against your goals is an essential requirement of long–term success. A ‘measure, analyse and act’ mindset will help to establish and maintain a positive, ongoing and timeous feedback loop on performance. Doing so will help to hold you and your team accountable for delivering on your goals as set out in your social media plan.
Key social media metrics that you will want to measure include;
· number of fans and followers,
· post views, likes and comments,
· sharing of your content by fans and followers,
· clicks on ads and promotions,
· enquiries raised and response rates by your team,
· brand mentions,
· leads and email subscribers generated,
· the impact on your website analytics, and
· sales closed and revenue generated.
Step 6: Improving
Outcomes from your monitoring and reporting will provide you with the insights you need to make the necessary changes. These include modifying processes and systems to maximise ongoing performance results. Here, you will need to decide on;
· design and content changes to make,
· additional resources and outsourcing that may be required,
· additional market and competitor research,
· tools to help automate your processes, and
· additional budgets you may need to pour into your social media campaign, to improve on your financial and non–financial results.
In the next chapter we look at how to tie all the tools together.