Our Tips for Putting a Social Media Strategy in Place for Your Business

Social media is constantly evolving. Even the term social media makes it seem like one thing, but really, it is a term used to describe a number of very different platforms, each with their own unique set of etiquette, rules, limitations, and audiences.

Social media includes Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, Google+, but it can also include blogging, Reddit, and many, many more platforms. It’s no wonder keeping up with social media can be a full time gig, and can be overwhelming. For many, social media has been a frustrating new item on their “to-do” list that they force themselves to participate in out of necessity. The problem is, if you aren’t strategically using social media, and are only pushing out content to check it off of your list, you will be missing out on a great opportunity for a (usually free) marketing channel that has the potential to offer you a great ROI.

Let’s not lose sight of what social media marketing is. While you will find slight variations in it’s definition depending on who you ask, we like this definition by WordSteam:

“Social media marketing, or SMM, is a form of internet marketing that involves creating and sharing content on social media networks in order to achieve your marketing and branding goals. Social media marketing includes activities like posting text and image updates, videos, and and other content that drives audience engagement, as well as paid social media advertising.”

The key to the definition is in it’s hint at strategy: creating and sharing content to achieve your marketing and branding goals.

So here is the million dollar question: What are your marketing and branding goals for social media?

If you don’t know, work to answer it clearly and concisely. Not only will this help steer you in the direction of creating and sharing better content, it will also help you decide which social networks to focus on. As we mentioned previously, there are many social networks to participate in. We recommend you focus on 2 or 3 primary networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, because trying to be active and engaged and consistent across much more than that won’t be effective, especially if you have limited time and staff.

To help you decide what your goal is with social media marketing, consider the following questions:

1. Who is your target audience, and what platform are they most active on? The more you know about your target demographic, the more effective you can be.
2. What kind of visuals will you share? Branding is a part of this – so be thoughtful.
3. What kind of content is going to be valuable to your followers? What questions can you help answer, what solutions to their problems can you provide?
4. Do you prefer to create blog posts, short videos, infographics, etc.?
5. Now, honestly: how much time do you have? You will want to be consistent to get results, so don’t over-commit. Quality over quantity, like slow and steady, wins the race.

Once you have answered these questions, you will have a more focused way of looking at how to use social media to market your business. Try to have fun, be authentic, and remember that just as social media evolves, you can also evolve and try new things if you aren’t getting the results you are hoping for.

Which brings us to our final tip: Make sure you have a system in place for tracking and monitoring the content your audience responds well to, and what they don’t engage with, so you can use that data to keep getting better results, whatever your goal might be.

If you are interested in learning more about social media marketing for your business, or if you are interested in partnering with an agency to help you get it all done, we’d love to learn more about what you are currently doing. Contact our team at Top Marketing Agency by dialing (888)843-9840 to explore opportunities for your business to gain more traffic, secure more leads, and close more sales.