Social media is more important now than ever before when it comes to creating an effective social media strategy for your company. With these tips below, you will not only be able to improve your social media strategy but also increase your business by reaching more customers at once. Here are five ways to create an effective social media strategy:
1. Identify Your Target Audience
The first step to creating an effective social media strategy in 2017 is to clearly define who your audience is. Once you understand who your audience is, it will be easier to create effective posts and content for your social media presence. There are several different ways you can identify your audience. You should start by taking a look at your current customer base and their needs.
If one of your goals is to keep your current customer base, then you need to figure out the demographic of your customer base and their spending habits to target their needs and wants. If you don’t have a large enough customer base or are looking to expand or change your customer base, there are several tools out there to help you find the type of people that would naturally be drawn to your brand. Tools like Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn Analytics are great options for understanding how well your posts are being received and by who.
Know Where You Want to Go
Having goals is important when thinking about your social media strategy. Creating content and posts that aren’t related to set goals can end up going nowhere and not producing any results. Having goals can generate ideas for posts and boost your visibility and followers.
Some goals that you might want to consider for your company’s social media strategy include increasing your overall traffic to your website, increasing engagement, boosting your conversion rate, and earning more revenue from social media. With clear, achievable goals you can easily set your company up for success using social media.
Create Interesting Content
Now that you have an understanding of your target audience and your set your goals, the next step in creating an effective social media strategy is to focus on the content. It’s important to keep in mind that social media users in 2017 aren’t interested in reading long, wordy articles that are time-consuming and hard for them to digest.
A good way to create engaging content is to focus on articles with a lot of white space and shorter, broken up paragraphs. Incorporating images and videos is also going to keep the interest of your reader. The most successful social media strategies involve a mix of different digital media to keep followers engaged and interested.
Dedicate Time and Resources
While social media may seem like something that’s a no-brainer to do, it can actually be a complicated and involved project. It may be a good idea to allocate a specific budget and hire a social media manager who knows what they’re doing. With a professional, they will be able to use tools to increase the engagement of your followers, post at specific times when the most people will view your content, and use SEO keywords to drive more traffic to your website.
Social media advertising is also taking over the marketing world and is expected to make up over 20% of business’ advertising in the next five years. Dedicating a budget to social media advertising can be a cost-effective and direct way to reach potential customers.
Optimize for Mobile
In today’s mobile world, people are checking their phones upwards of 150 times per day. Most people use their social media almost exclusively on mobile devices. It’s important that your effective social media strategy is optimized to perform on all kinds of mobile screens so that you can reach the widest audience possible.
When you link to articles or your website, make sure that they are all accessible and easily read on a mobile device. The same with sales and contact forms. Every aspect of your company should be as easily accessed via mobile as it is on a desktop.