Plan your way to social media success

Planning, planning, and more planning.

Before you launched your business, planning was your best friend. Strategies, timelines, industry research – you name it, there was a plan for it. The same goes with developing your social media presence.

Before you begin posting content and using hashtags, you need to have a plan. Developing a detailed strategy from the start helps provide the framework for your social media success.

Social media doesn’t have to be stressful. It’s a unique part of your brand’s overall marketing strategy and should be integrated as such. With a plan in place, you’ll avoid accidental repetition and over saturation – which can make your messaging appear stale and bland.

Here are a few tips for establishing a successful social media strategy guaranteed to succeed.

Decide on your volume and frequency

How much content do you want to share, and how frequently do you want your target audience to hear from you? Depending on the type of business you are in and the products or services you sell, your post frequency could range from daily to weekly or more.

Determining volume and frequency pre-posting helps plan for staffing, content creation, and other operational needs.

Integrate with your marketing plan

As mentioned above, a social media strategy that is closely tied to your business’s comprehensive marketing plan is more effective than an independent strategy.

By tying social media in with your existing marketing, you have a better chance to strengthen your message, increase your audience impressions, and maintain top-of-mind awareness. If you don’t have a formalized marketing plan, building one in conjunction with the creation of your social media strategy is a good way to build efficiency into your entire marketing game plan.

Align with your business goals

Social media is a marketing tool, and just like any other marketing tool, it is best used with a specific goal in mind. Your social media strategy should align with your business goals and have a purpose in mind. Are you launching a new product or service on a set timeline?

Then you may use social media as a ramp up to launch, teasing with supplemental information or additional insights that complement your other marketing efforts. Are you building or maintaining audience awareness? Then a consistent, repetitive approach might work better to drive your brand awareness home in the minds of consumers.

Are you trying to foster engagements and improve customer service? A responsive approach interspersed with promotions can help increase customer-business social interactivity. Know your goals before crafting your social media marketing strategy.

Create an editorial calendar

Your editorial calendar is the starting point for your content calendar, which we’ll talk about in a future post. The editorial calendar is a macro-level overview that maps out themes (like a product or service, or a new offering) for specific blocks of time (a day, week or month, depending on the volume/frequency decisions you made previously).

This calendar should take into account seasonality, ebbs and flows in your business’s sales cycles, events, holidays, customer engagement trends and other cyclical or repetitive occurrences.

Evaluate, then reevaluate

Social media strategies are decisions made using the best information available at the time. But, like all marketing tools and campaigns, they need to be evaluated for effectiveness, and then modified to accommodate changing parameters and improved information availability.

Your social media strategy is not a “set-it-and-forget-it” plan, so don’t treat it as such. Optimization is key.

This post is a part of a six article series on how small businesses can leverage social media for success.

1. Plan Your Way to Social Media Success
2. Which Social Media Channels Should Your Brand Be Using
3. Coming Up (and Keeping Up!) with Content
4. Analyze THIS! Leveraging Social Media Analytics
5. Managing Your Social Media Management
6. Social Media Best Practices

Get Social With Thrive!

Think you are ready for a real social media strategy for your business? Contact us online or call (817)-642-9686 to get started, and check back here for our next small business social media blog on picking the right social media platform to engage your target audience.