The way businesses operate has undergone a sea change in the past decade. Earlier, it was all about the needs of the company. Now, the demands of the audience are taken into consideration as well. Why? To establish a better relationship with them and convert them into loyal customers.
For this purpose, businesses deliver a constant stream of social media content. But this content is hardly random; it is high-quality, relevant and carefully designed to pique the interest of the users. If you wish to succeed and achieve your business goals, you too must plan your social media content delivery. And to create your very own social media strategy map, check out the steps below.
Figure Out What Drives Your Customers
You will never achieve the business success you crave for until you figure out your target audience. And this might seem like an easy enough task based on the regular demographics of gender, age, etc. But the thing is, you have to move beyond identifying the customer’s address, marital status, and interests.
This is the era of “experience,” and you must provide an experience that customers will appreciate. This is exactly what sets companies like Airbnb and Uber apart – they’ve gained success due to the amazing customer experience they provide while, at the same time, fulfilling some need.
So pay attention to the questions your target audience is asking, and build your business by answering these questions and providing rich content in the process. This content may be in the form of infographics, images, webinars, and posts. The more time you devote towards understanding the thought process of your customer, the better your content will resonate with them. By the end, you’ll be in a position to gain their trust.
Understand How Social Media Figures Into Your Business: Identify KPI's
Define the goal for your social media campaigns. Otherwise, you will fail to assess the failure or success of your efforts. The three main goals include:
- Community Building
- Brand Awareness Enhancement
- Engagement Boost
Find more details on each below:
Community Building
Create a closed community of individuals who’ve engaged with your company and invested in your service or product. Measure the growth of this community by tracking metrics like:
- Live video engagements
- Daily post engagements
- Questions being asked by group members
- Number of members in the group
For this purpose, you might have to use third-party analytics tools such asGrytics, Simply Measured, or Brandwatch
Brand Awareness Enhancement
According to MediaKix, the average person spends nearly two hours on the five major social media platforms. So, you need to assess your brand awareness by analyzing metrics like:
- Number of followers
- Impressions
- Number of shares and mentions
- Profile visits
- New followers
- Top mentions
Engagement Improvement
Higher your engagement on social media, more trustworthy your brand is deemed and the more recommendations users receive. In fact, some social media sites prioritize posts with higher engagement, showing them at the top of the feed. So, you need to boost your engagement.
Pick The Suitable Social Network(s)
You need to target social networks based on the demographics of each platform to get the results you want. So before choosing a platform, research about the social media sites your target audience is interested in. Concentrate on two major areas:
Network Demographics
Network demographics matter considerably. For example, Facebook – the biggest social media platform – has a monthly active user base of 1.86 billion. And out of this, 79 percent of users are adults (according to astudy by Pew Research). The 18 to 29 demographic constitutes 88 percent, 30 to 49 is 84 percent, 50 to 64 covers 72 percent, while 65 and above is 62 percent. If you consider gender, a larger percentage of women users (83 percent) are Facebook members compared to 75 percent men. Also, users on Facebook watch more than 100 million hours worth of video content on a daily basis. All this information can come in handy when you’re trying to figure out whether Facebook fits the profile of your target customer or not.
Reciprocity Across Platforms
A business must take into account the reciprocity across the important social media platforms. If for instance, the chosen network of your target customer is Facebook, you should consider the chances of them using Twitter too.
Boost Internal Stakeholders’ Social Appeal
What if I told you there’s a mini-army of potential brand advocates ready to work for you? These are your people – employees, vendors, investors and more. Primarily, for a B2B brand, it can work wonders to work with your people and motivate them to share the brand’s content with their social networks.
Of course, you will need to incentivize this action, and make the content share-worthy. Here are some usefulsocial sharing message examples to help your audience get started. Once you mobilize internal resources, use basic analytics to identify the niche influencers and micro influencers that are already part of your brand family.
These types of “in-house influencers” can prove to be invaluable for many reasons. Brands that knowhow to keep employees engaged often find it easier to retain star performers, find that their reputations as great employers spike and enjoy lower costs in their social media-based content distribution efforts.
Focus On The Right Content Topics
Plan your content to be unique, relevant, and specific. Create content that will engage your readers. For that reason, you need to figure out what sort of content they want.
Create a survey using tools likeSurveyMonkey or run a Twitter poll. While choosing questions, keep your goal in mind. Also, you can encourage responses by customers by offering rewards for completing the survey. Studying your competitors can also be a learning experience for your company – this way you can figure out what they’re doing right.
You can use tools likeFeedly to research your industry over the Internet.
Generate Leads
Use the company’s social media accounts to start your own lead generation strategy. Post funny, useful, valuable content that links back to your website for delivering targeted leads.
At the same time, analyze your lead generation tactics. SMS lead generation can work wonders, even with simplistic tactics such as using a ‘Click to text us for a quote’ button on your landing pages, and personalizing text messages.
Once you’ve gathered all the required data from your site, Google Analytics account, or lead capture software to bring it to the attention of the higher-ups so that they can add a degree of innovation to the way your business adds value to its services and products via social media.
Keep Track Of Your Progress
The final part of your social media strategy map involves measuring your business success and adjusting the course, if necessary. Now, success is gauged via reach and conversions.
Reach means how many people have expressed interest in your content. You get to know the impact of your social media content on your target audience. On the other hand, conversions allow you to determine if the focus on social media is pushing your sales forward.
Final Thoughts
According to Statista, the number of worldwide social network users is expected to increase to 2.62 billion by 2018. And if you want to stand out from the crowd and appeal to a broad demographic, you need a solid strategy in place.
Putting together your very own social media strategy map will not only help you increase trust and engagement with your customers but will help your company grow as well.
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- Your 12 Step Social Strategy Blueprint
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- How To Create A Successful Social Media Strategy
* Adapted lead image: 
