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How to Establish a Winning Social Media Strategy in 2019?

February 26, 2019

To clarify the action plan that will support the marketing efforts of your company, you need to establish a social media strategy. It’s essential to plan the management of your brand’s community, create an editorial calendar for the creation of content, establish your advertising images or videos display, etc.

How do you build a winning social media strategy adapted for you?
Here are the first questions you need to ask yourself:

What are your goals?
Who is your target audience?
Which platforms should you use?
What is your strategy of content?
What is your budget?
What are your results?
How can you improve your performance?

Let’s look at these points more closely.

YOUR OBJECTIVES

Since social networks have the potential to reach a very large number of users, you must first establish what your goals are. In the end, what do you want to achieve with your efforts on social media?

Awareness: It’s possible that your company is not very well-known and you wish to make yourself known more. To do so, you may be thinking of creating content that targets people in a specific business field, age group, gender, or a certain location in which you need to expose your brand to and publicize.

Loyalty: Maybe you have an established brand, but would you like your audience to remain committed to you?

Business Development: Or maybe you want to encourage partners or potential customers to want to do business with you?

Marketing Human Resources: You may also need to support your recruitment efforts and think of using social networks to find more quality candidates?

No matter what your main goals are, your social networking strategy will bring you closer to achieving it. That’s why it’s important to have clear goals to optimize your strategy and adapt your content.

YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE

Once your goals are set, you must now define who your publications will be addressed to. Is it to consumers of your brand (B2C) or other entrepreneurs in your field (B2B), maybe it’s to students, or a group of people with a specific interest?

To identify your target audience, it is important to do what is called a persona.

A persona is a fictional character you create that represents a typical profile of a user who uses your brand.

In order to portray your persona, you need to identify a typical profile of your user. It is recommended to determine:

His age
His gender
His work
His place of residence
His interests
etc.

Once you have defined your persona, you will be able to establish a coherent editorial strategy and determine the tone of your publications to better reach your audience.

YOUR PLATFORMS

You must now identify your platforms of choice. Which platforms is your persona using? Is he active on Facebook? Is he a fan of YouTube videos? Or maybe he likes fashion and looks at pictures on Instagram? Or, is he a member of the press or a blogger who shares his opinions on Twitter? Perhaps he’s making a significant income and tries to develop his business on LinkedIn?

It’s important to choose the platform(s) on which you want to focus your social media efforts.

YOUR CONTENT STRATEGY

Now is the time to define your content strategy to feed your platforms of choice.

When creating your posts, ask yourself what really interests your personas. Your community will be engaged if your content speaks to them directly. It’s recommended not to be too commercial in your messages. Try to produce better quality content. If possible, turn to content that is generated by users in your community. They will feel appreciated and more engaged. For example, share their opinions or videos when they say good things about you. It’s win-win! Ask them questions. It’s also important to identify your influencers. Are there influential people in your field of activity that your community follows?

Also be sure to adapt your messages for the chosen platforms. On Facebook, you might want to focus on posting questions, images, or videos, while on Instagram you prefer to focus more on stories.

To do this, make sure you optimize your posting times. Schedule your publications on a good frequency and at the right times. Of course, your audience is more likely to read your content if you post it when they are connected, rather than when they are sleeping in the middle of the night.

YOUR BUDGET

If you are planning any advertising or media campaign, it is important to define your budget.

How much do you want to invest in acquiring new users on your platforms? When you publish something important and want to promote a publication, you can spend a certain amount to put your message forward. If you are in the mobile apps or games industry, would you like to invest in a number of installations from new users? Encourage them to be more active? You are organizing a particular event and you want to create an advertisement to increase the number of people present?

Your budget can make a big difference in your results, where the competition is fierce and the algorithms are also decisive factors, so be sure to establish an envelope that fits your needs.

YOUR RESULTS

To make sure you’re on the right track, it’s important to measure your key performance indicators (KPIs) regularly.

Here are the main performance indicators to measure:

Your number of subscribers
The number of impressions of your publications
The engagement (likes, comments, shares)
The number of private messages
Etc.

Can you see the impact that your latest posts have had on your goals? Do you have more subscribers? Do people know you better or have you had new potential customers following a post? If your results are positive, you are on the right track and you have to keep moving forward!

On the other hand, if the results of some publications leave something to be desired, you will need to modify this part of your strategy to maximize your efforts.

By planning regular times to analyze your performance and monitor its evolution, you will come out victorious!