Creating Your Own Social Media Strategy

          The ultimate key to social media marketing is having a strategy. Without this strategy, you might be posting on social media platforms for the sake of posting. Having an understanding of what will be your goals are, who your target audience is, and what they really want, it’ll be hard to achieve results on social media. 

Whether you want to grow your brand through social media or to level up as a social media marketer, developing a social media marketing strategy is essential.

      Here are the lists to deepen a little more and will explain how you can create and monitor a strategy in social networks step by step:

Define Your Goals

There should be no social media strategy without a goal. In the marketing plan, you will first define the objectives, then the strategies and your tactics. In a sentence, I would sum it up like this:

• Your goal is where you want to be and your strategy is how to get there.
• Do not forget that your goals have to be specific, realistic, measurable and with a certain period of time. The most common objectives in social networks are:
• Increase your online community in one or more social networks.
• Increase your online reputation, that is to make your brand known on social networks.
• Improve the satisfaction of your followers.
• Generate engagement.
• Promote your company and its respective products or services.
• Sell your products or services on the Internet.

         Through working in social networks you will discover how new your objectives are generated as a result of your previous actions.

Listen

         It is very important to analyze the current situation of your brand in social networks before taking a new step, especially before creating and executing a new strategy. The task of listening takes a lot of time, but it certainly offers a number of advantages for the brand, including:

• Knowing what are the strengths and weaknesses of the brand.
• Getting to know your followers more by analyzing their behavior, their interests, their needs, etc.
• Knowing what type of content is most effective.
• Knowing the opinion of the followers of the brand.

      Now returning to the topic, to create a strategy this is what you have to hear on social networks:

Products And Services - creating a list of “keywords” of your products and services search the social networks that are commented on.

Competition - through a new list of “keywords” with the name of the competitors and the keywords of their products and services, an exhaustive search is conducted to see what type of strategy the brand competition is using. Do not forget that it is not about copying, it is about learning the good and the bad that they do forever to make it BETTER.

Environment - do not just listen to your products and services, also look for what is happening in your brand environment defining "keywords".

       By listening to the audience you can know the behavior, interests, and needs they have. No doubt this will help to better communicate the message of the strategy.

Define Your Target

         In the previous step, the brand has made an "active listening", which means that the target we want to reach is already known a little better. What habits does it have and how can the brand generate engagement with them. You have to define everyone involved in the process of your strategy. 

Define Your Strategy And Message

                          What will be the strategy you will use to achieve your goal?

          You have reached the intermediate level, you know your goal, you have listened and you have your target, the next step is to define the strategy. Imagine that your goal is to “Gain your followers loyalty”, your strategy can be to make a promotion on Facebook only for fans of the brand. The title of the strategy cannot be communicated directly to the fans. Therefore, it is necessary to define a message. Don't be stingy creating a good message, the more creative and striking the message, the better results will be obtained. 

Generate The Content Of Your Strategy

         Strategy and message ready, now you need to define and generate the content that supports the strategy. The content you generate must first and foremost be constant and impactful. 

Define The Channels

       Depending on the type of content that you want to communicate with your followers, different channels are used. Even so, I recommend defining the main channels you will use to launch the strategy. Social Networks: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tuenti, Pinterest, Instagram, Foursquare, Spotify, Podcasts, Web page, Blogs and many more.

Plan The Content

      Usually, a strategy involves the publication of different types of content on different social networks. The first would be to define the type of content to be used and the second would be to prepare an editorial calendar that has the priority, frequency, and publication of each content.

      This type of planning also serves to divide the tasks with the rest of the social media team. Assign the creation and management of the content to each party while one of the people serves as a supervisor and controls that everything is carried out as planned.

Calculate the Budget

        Depending on the type of strategy you are going to use, the cost varies. Calculating the budget is not just another step in this process of creating social media strategies, it is very important to measure the results versus the investment made. There are also cases where you have to get financial approval from the customer to start. 

Remember that the generation of content, even if it is done internally, has a cost. 

Launch Your Strategy

         At this point, you only have to launch your strategy and monitor it from its beginning to its end. Community loyalty of users who have participated, if it is a contest or a raffle there would be the number of participants if it is promotion: the number of people who have used it. 

You can improve the engagement of your followers through comments, likes, replies, mentions, etc.