How to Plan Your Social Media Strategy: A Quick Guide for Businesses

There’s no denying that social media plays a significant role in how businesses market to their customers. With Facebook becoming more than a platform for connecting with people, its new features have provided businesses – big or small – an avenue to drive more sales. Twitter has become an engagement hub that keeps customers informed about their brands, while LinkedIn establishes professional connections.

As much as social media can be helpful brands reach more audiences and gain more online traction, there’s a strategy for utilizing its full potential.

Start with these steps: 

Develop your SMART goals
Every strategy has a goal or goals attached to it. This makes your approach more laser-focused and allows you to set your social media campaigns in the right direction. More importantly, this helps you in measuring if your strategy was successful or if it needs more fine-tuning.

Your goals should be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound).

Examples of a SMART goal are the

• Increase audience engagement by 5% by the end of the quarter on Facebook and Twitter.
• Increase the clickthrough rate (CTR) from 2% to 3% at the end of this month.
• The more defined your goals, the easier it will be to develop a social media marketing campaign for your brand.
• Have a deeper understanding of your audience

Every social media platform caters to a specific set of audience. LinkedIn, for example, is a space that professionals and recruiters use to network or find talent. Facebook has a more massive user base and provides a hodgepodge of audience.

So, what does this have to do with your strategy? It helps you define if you’re communicating the right message to the right audience. That’s where buyer personas come in.

Creating a buyer persona allows you to develop a campaign around a specific audience based on their demographics and psychographics. After all, the best way to connect with other people on social media is to know what their interests and motivations are.

Experiment with different content formats – but choose the one that fits the platform.

The beauty of social media is you can experiment with different content formats. For instance, you want to amplify your brand’s presence on Instagram, hiring a social media management agency in the Philippines with the creative skills to shoot your photos can be a good move.

Content formats may also vary on the campaign you’re running. If you want to promote a product demonstration, short video clips on Facebook can be a good strategy. Looking to provide bite-sized information on the latest trends? Twitter is your platform.

Think about the goal of the campaign and the platform you’ll be using so you have a better grasp of which content format to use.

• Use a social media calendar.

Time is of the essence when it comes to social media campaigns. This is where a calendar becomes important.

Just like an editorial content calendar, a social media calendar helps you organize which content to publish for your social media platforms at the right time. This allows you to plot your strategies with more accuracy, so you can maximize engagement on each social media platform.

• Adjust your strategy accordingly. 

Even with a calendar in place, there may be times that you’ll have to adjust your strategy. This is why you need to have room for flexibility for your social media campaigns. Trends, for example, can be an example of how brands adjust what they post on their social media.

Social media management companies use social listening as part of their strategy to keep an eye on any valuable information or trend. Keeping track of what customers saying or what the competition is doing can help you further refine your strategy.

Time to Be More Social

We’re at the age that almost everyone you know has a social media account – whether it’s on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or LinkedIn. Know how to use this opportunity as leverage to further drive more business. Because if you’re not using it, your competitors are surely doing their own strategies. Are you going to let them have the edge?

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• About Author:

  Allen Madzen