Many things have changed thanks to social media in the last decade. More than half of the world’s population regularly uses one or more of the major social media platforms. And for the world of business, regardless of the industry, this means that a rich and powerful social media presence is becoming more and more indispensable. And we’ve seen time and again that social networks can be beneficial to businesses if they know how to use them.
Whether you are starting a new business, or you are growing an existing one, the only way to truly benefit from your social media accounts, is if you work on them constantly. Even though social media is a part of your marketing efforts, it’s important to remember that it’s about much more than simple promotion and trying to attract people to your business. It’s about establishing a foundation upon which your business can thrive. It’s about gathering a community around your brand, building a reputation, and a meaningful relationship with prospects, based on loyalty and trust.
Here we talk about four key things you should know to be able to create a winning social media strategy.
Know Which Social Media Goals You Want to Achieve
Before you start working on your strategy, you should learn what can be achieved through social media, and define what is important to you.
Contrary to what small business owners might think, due to their previous understanding of Instagram, for instance, it’s not so easy to define goals for your Instagram growth. If you set a goal that’s impossible to reach or one that isn’t relevant to your business, your social media may not make a difference to your business’s success, or it can even hurt your reputation.
One way to know if your goals will work in your favor is to ask yourself if they are SMART. This clever acronym stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound goals.
Know How You Can Achieve Your Social Media Goals
Once you know your goals, you should come up with a plan. Finding the right steps you should take to achieve them, or in other words, the right tactics is another hard part of the process of building a social media marketing strategy. It’s where you will encounter the most obstacles, the most challenges, where you will have to make difficult decisions, and most likely make mistakes.
For instance, if your goal is to increase brand awareness, your tactics can be using paid ads, making interesting, useful videos, collaborating with influencers, etc. One of the best things about social media is that it’s not too hard to know how successful your efforts are. By measuring and analyzing your results, you will be able to optimize your tactics along the way.
Some of the tactics every social media strategy should count on include:
- Creating unique, valuable, and relevant content.
- Showing who you are and what you stand for.
- Interacting with followers.
- Inspiring user-generated content.
- Using paid ads and influencers.
Know the Right Place to Achieve Your Social Media Goals
Not all social media platforms are equal. The two biggest differences between the major networks preferred by businesses across industries, such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, Twitter, YouTube, etc., are the average age of the users, and the content format preferred by them.
This means that, based on the products or services your business is offering, one platform may be more suitable for you than others. On Instagram and Facebook, for instance, most of the users in the US are between the age of 25 and 34, whereas a quarter of TikTok users are under 19, and almost another quarter of users are under 29. So, one way to choose which platforms suit your needs best is based on the age of your target audience.
Nevertheless, being present on various social networks will help you share your content with more people, and increase your reach and your conversion rate. More importantly, if one of your accounts is performing better than the others, you can cross-promote to grow it even more.
Know When You Need Help
Even if you are one of many who love using social media, running business accounts isn’t simple. This is why it may be smart to outsource your social media marketing, or at least parts of it, and use growth tools that can help you achieve your goals.
Final Thoughts
The ability to create real communities around their brands isn’t a privilege only for huge businesses anymore. Thanks to social media, even small businesses with modest resources can find their way into the lives of more of their ideal customers. How vast their number will be, depends on your ability to create a winning strategy and execute it.
