How to come up with a strategy for social networks?
Social networks affect our everyday life. Through them we may see how we think, what we talk about and what topics are principal for us. The users wrestle for followers and compare their amount of likes, comments and shares with the others. What opportunities and traps are awaiting you within the field of the online world?
It’s hard to reach our goal without a clearly set up vision. This works with our self-presentation within the social network. We must know what we do, why we do it and what we want to achieve with it.
Majority of you surely have some kind of business strategy. However, there is not that many of you having a social media strategy. Since nowadays almost everything exists within the area of the online world, something like the social media strategy ought not to be neglected. Otherwise you may be creating super cool products, but nobody will actually know about them.
While creating a communication strategy, you should answer four major questions for yourself:
How do we work now? (analysis)
What do we want to achieve? (goals)
How do we achieve it? (strategy)
How do we measure it? (evaluation)
Many companies do not have any strategy at all
At the beginning, it’s crucial to realize that each company is different, and so each needs a different strategy. It’s not good to copy from the others. A successfull strategy of someone else’s company does not necessarily bring success to you as well. Each company has its own individual goals, capacity and needs, based on which creates the strategy.
Many companies either do not have any strategy at all, or their strategy is rather poorly defined. If this is also your case, do not worry. Get down to the the first step – analysis. This should precede any changes you aim to make. Just sit down and find out about your current situation. What are your strengths and weaknesses? Think deeply, as you may either discover a problem you didn’t know about, or realize that you are doing pretty well.
Before you begin with the analysis, become aware of what you need, and what is the actual reason for the analysis. Do you struggle with approaching your audience? Do you want to focus more on the visual side of your content? Come up with your goal.
TIP: Would you like to know how is your brand perceived among people? Start with a research. It doesn’t have to be something large and expensive. Just go and ask a few questions among your clients or some random people on the street. Based on the experience provided by this pilot research, you may decide whether you want to commence something larger, or you already found all you needed.
What are your goals?
While establishing your goals, be sure to have them straight and clearly defined.
S – specific
M – measurable
A – achievable
R – relevant
T – time framed
Goals ought to be specific – clearly aimed at what we want to gain/realize. There should also exist an option of measuring the results. That’s practicable via various metrics or monitoring devices. A good one is measuring how people interact. During this process, you easily define the ones that are actually interested in the content you want them to.
TIP: Mediaboard is capable of tracking what people talk about, what they say about you and your competition, what is the competition doing well and what isn’t, and also what topics are discussed within the field of the online world. Read more about the social media monitoring and the application Social Mediaboard.
A well defined goal is achievable. It’s important to observe how we are managing to fulfill the defined strategy. We may not worry to step in if need be. Based on the continuous results, we may define our goal better.
It’s crucial to think about the goals’ relevance. The goals should respond to the company’s focus and what could help it to develop. Following the evaluation of the campaign’s success, it’s important to have it time framed. There also need to be clearly set up dates, during which we may recapitulate the existing process.
Focused on strategy
Looking closer at the strategy itself, we should be able to answer the following questions:
What kind of social media will we use?
Who is going to be responsible for them?
What kind of content will be there?
What rules will we establish?
How much money, time and people will we earmark?
What are we going to solve externally?
What devices are we planning to use?
What are we going to evaluate?
While choosing the kind of social media we want to be using, we should be thinking about our target group we aim to address. On Facebook we find various groups of people, on LinkedIn we meet business partners, and on Instagram we approach the young generation. It’s necessary to realize if we possess enough content, that we can share on those social media platforms. While Instagram and YouTube are oriented visually, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn make a use of text posts more.
If you are willing to have a high-quality social network, you must be ready to put money into it. Finances do not come only with paid-for campaigns. You ought not to forget to cover the employees’ salary, external companies or the programmes you are using. Some of the programmes you may want to use are analytical devices – to which our Social Mediaboard belongs – or some sort of an assistance with creating the content (posts’s planning, publications plans).
To evaluate the campaign, the aforementioned people interaction may be a good way to do so. A fine person interacts with the content, helps to share it and speaks about the brand. It doesn’t matter how many people get involved in the interaction. We care about those who leave some comments, give likes and watch our videos. The first-rate ones are those who click their way through the online world to our web and ideally become our clients.
Social media is integral to today’s world
To create a successful social media profile is not an easy task. However, nowadays, we come to interact with social media on our phones, laptops or ipads. Therefore, it’s not possible to neglect them when communicating with our clients. Use, study, analyse and optimize them based on your preferences.
TIP: Some companies collaborate with influencers, in order to raise public awareness of their brand. If you are also looking for one, search among your clients. Isn’t there anyone influential, who is really interested in your brand and can promote it? In Mediaboard application you may see and make a use of the influence score – the amount of people influenced.