In order to succeed with social media, you’re going to need a solid strategy behind you. Just posting randomly, or whenever you have the time, won’t help you achieve your business goals.
If you’ve been looking for a way to build a social media strategy that’ll help define your direction, while being easy to track, then this post is for you.
Below you’ll learn the ins-and-outs of creating a social media strategy that will help your business succeed, not just become a time-sink.
What Kind of Goals to You Want to Achieve?
Every solid social media strategy starts with defining the kind of goals you want to realize for your business. Below we offer three of the most common goals, which will help you decide the direction you’ll be taking your posting strategy.
1. Driving Traffic
Chances are, one of the biggest reasons you want to grow your social media audience is to send more relevant traffic and leads back to your website. Focusing on traffic generation is a good idea if your website’s traffic has stagnated, or you don’t feel your existing content is getting the readership it deserves.
In order to track traffic levels, you’ll want to keep an eye on the following:
- Total number of views from social media
- Referral sources from social media platforms
- Bounce rate from social media traffic sources
When you’re looking at your social media traffic make sure to keep an eye on conversions. Is the traffic you’re sending via social media actually resulting in a steady increase of new leads? If it isn’t then you might want to adjust your strategy or focus on other social media platforms.
The best method to drive traffic from social media is to consistently share and promote your own content. Make sure you include an engaging CTA, that encourages your followers to click through to learn more.
2. Increasing Brand Awareness
Improving brand awareness is a great way to get the word out about your brand. And social media is one of the best ways to do exactly that.
Whether you’re launching a new product and want to improve its reach, or are a new business that’s looking to grow its relevance in the market, social media can help you increase the size of your existing audience.
When you’re measuring improved brand awareness you’ll want to track the following metrics:
- Total number of shares, likes, and comments per post
- Total number of followers
- Number of brand mentions across the internet
If you see the numbers highlighted above go up, then you’re on your way towards a much larger brand reach.
When you’re trying to improve brand awareness the best way to do this is to share highly engaging and entertaining content. The focus of this content doesn’t have to be about your products and services but should be related to your business in some way. The goal of the content you’re creating and sharing should be to get the absolute widest reach possible.
3. Build an Engaged Community
One of the main goals that surround your social media strategy should be to build an engaged following. This following can then take on a new life and form an engaged community that surrounds your business.
Building a community can help to improve your overall customer service, help to create fans for life, and greatly improve the overall engagement with your brand.
Now, building a community around your brand can be difficult to achieve, but well worth the effort. When it comes to building an audience that trusts and supports you it’s hard to beat the value of an engaged community.
To measure the success of your community-building efforts keep an eye on the following metrics:
- Increase in the total number of comments
- More shares per social media post
- More brand mentions
- Referrals from other customers
The best way to encourage a community around your business is to be very active and conversational. Ask tons of questions and engage with every comment and response. Some people even choose to create separate Facebook pages or Linkedin groups that are related to their area of expertise.
Always think about how you can be adding value to your community, whether it’s a completely separate group or a part of your existing social media profiles. The more helpful and solutions-based you can be the more value your community will have.
Succeeding with social media begins will deciding the goals you want to achieve, creating and sharing the right kind of content, then measuring your results.
If you’re looking for some help on creating a social media strategy that gets your business results, then reach out to our team today.
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