Knowing the type of post that will bring you the required interaction between you and your followers on social media is critical for achieving your social media goals. To constantly achieve the engagement numbers you need for your brand, you have to have a social media strategy in place. What is social media strategy and why does it matter?
A social media strategy is a document outlining your social media goals, the tactics you will use to achieve them and the metrics you will track to measure your progress. (Hootsuite)
For brands and companies, when we talk about social media strategy, we are talking about a carefully planned outline of content that includes execution, structure, and tasks for social media teams. It’s important to have a clear understanding of the brand’s business goals. You should be able to draw a straight line from the business goals to your social media goals, so that your social media results will align with results from other marketing and sales initiatives.
In this media-saturated climate, having a consistent social media strategy is super important because it focuses your social media efforts, and helps you to stand out and attract the right audience to your content. Today, we will talk about certain key factors that ultimately make up a good SM Strategy
Setting Goals
Goals are where you begin when you’re creating a social media strategy. It’s important to set clear deliverables and parameters (Key Performance Indicators) to measure whether your content is working successfully or not. KPIs may encompass metrics such as total reach, engagement rate, number of orders received, new followers, etc. all achieved within a defined time frame, whether it’s on a monthly or quarterly basis. As an example, you might set a goal of gaining one hundred new followers within the upcoming month. Your social media goals should be very closely linked to your business goals.
Target Audience
It’s essential to understand the target audience and craft a strategy tailored to them, taking into account the predominant gender, demographic, and interests. These learnings will help you to develop and distribute the exact kind of content that will resonate with your audience. For example, if your brand serves young adults looking for affordable engagement rings, this will guide what kind of content you create, and how you choose to distribute it.
Social Media Channels
A brand may consider the possibility of having their presence and relevance on all the popular social platforms, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, and currently Threads. If they can sustain content distribution on all these channels in the long run, that’s great. But oftentimes, that is not the case. You may maintain a presence on all the platforms, but strategy and raw audience insight data will dictate to your team which channel to pay attention to and serve the most.
Content Planning
This involves the type of content to be distributed on your social platforms (e.g. images, videos, GIFs, links, etc.) Understand that the content types should be relevant, aligned, and valuable to the platform and audience. You will find that video content is driving the most engagement. So in the content planning stage, you may want to prioritize video content that aligns and is likely to generate engagement.
Content Calendar
A content calendar is a schedule for when and how often to post content, using platform insights and analytics to derive the best and peak times to keep the audience engaged.
Engagement Strategy
Your strategy for engagement should be to create a connection with the audience through comments and responses, thereby humanizing the brand. A good social media strategy should make room to have a human and friendly feel. Keep this in mind as you craft captions. How you present your brand to the audience will determine largely how they perceive you, and how they respond.
Crisis Management
As you grow your social media and your channels become more and more popular, there’s a likelihood for backlash or negative sentiments. A good social media strategy should have measures in place for situations like this. You should have a standard crisis plan for such an eventuality, designed to provide an appropriate response (if one is needed) and ultimately maintain and preserve the values of the brand.
Our strategy has delivered significant results for us, and a prime example of this is our presence on TikTok. We’ve witnessed tremendous growth. To put it into perspective, we launched our TikTok account in 2021 with only less than 50 followers, and now we’ve surged to an impressive 1.2 million followers.
Conclusion
Social media management evolves frequently. So should every brand or company’s typical social media strategy. This is to ensure that at every step of a brand’s or business’s growth, there is consistent alignment with the audience preference, insights/analytics, and adjusting to algorithms of each platform. Constant monitoring and proper optimization of content are required, and having put everything in place, it is important to recognize that the achievement of social media goals is a process that takes some time.
We offer social media end-to-end management as a core expertise at Pulse. From helping on social media strategy to executing the strategy fully for client social media (including content creation), we have built a reputation across our 6 operative markets in Africa, where we apply our social media expertise and our digital publishing experience to exceed expectations for partner brands. Talk to us here.
(This article was contributed by the social media team at Pulse Ghana.)