Process
The following are key considerations and stages of planning one should undertake when designing a social media strategy in order to maximize success
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Setting Your Objectives
Before you can even begin to consider how to structure your social media strategy, you need to ascertain what your objectives are. This could include anything from raising brand awareness online to driving traffic back to your sales website to improving brand sentiment online.
It is imperative that you have a clear idea of what your goal is so that you can more accurately design the campaign to drive that result, and also so that you can more accurately measure its success. Key questions that you need to ask yourself here are:
Working closely together with other departments or agencies may help draw together social media cause and effect. For instance, if you have an IT technician they may be able to help you set up programs to measure your KPIs (eg. Measuring how many people visit your blog).
It is imperative that you have a clear idea of what your goal is so that you can more accurately design the campaign to drive that result, and also so that you can more accurately measure its success. Key questions that you need to ask yourself here are:
- What is our objective?
- How are we going to measure this and what are our Key Performance Indicators?
- Do we have the systems in place to capture the KPIs?
Working closely together with other departments or agencies may help draw together social media cause and effect. For instance, if you have an IT technician they may be able to help you set up programs to measure your KPIs (eg. Measuring how many people visit your blog).
Landscape Analysis
At the heart of any good social media engagement strategy is an initial planning and identification process. This is called a landscape analysis, and the purpose of this is to gather intelligence about your target audience online. Engaging your target audience works as a direct factor of understanding where your target audience is and what they are interested in. Understanding the cares of your various audience groups and then developing your marketing activity with that in mind can help your campaign to become a two way conversation instead of a one way monologue.
Key questions that you need to consider at this point include:
There are a variety of different methods and tools that you can use to help carry out your landscape analysis. These include paid-for online services (eg. Radian 6, Dialogix, Brandtology, Brandwatch), hiring a traditional market research agency to conduct the research for you, or alternatively performing the research by hand or using some of the freely available search and monitoring tools.
Your landscape analysis will potentially be determined by various business factors. However, it’s probably best to try and cover all bases, so consider covering the following: maintram media, vertical media, industry blogs, social network conversations, YouTube, Google video search, Twitter, customer forums, industry forums and customer review sites. It can be helpful to record the results in an excel spreadsheet.
Key questions that you need to consider at this point include:
- Where does your audience reside online? (which platforms, what times they are online most)
- What are they currently engaged by? (what they talk about, view, watch, interact with, all the assets and content they consume and share)
There are a variety of different methods and tools that you can use to help carry out your landscape analysis. These include paid-for online services (eg. Radian 6, Dialogix, Brandtology, Brandwatch), hiring a traditional market research agency to conduct the research for you, or alternatively performing the research by hand or using some of the freely available search and monitoring tools.
Your landscape analysis will potentially be determined by various business factors. However, it’s probably best to try and cover all bases, so consider covering the following: maintram media, vertical media, industry blogs, social network conversations, YouTube, Google video search, Twitter, customer forums, industry forums and customer review sites. It can be helpful to record the results in an excel spreadsheet.
Content Strategy
Developing a content strategy involves applying the learnings of your landscape analysis to decide what types of media assets or activity you are going to integrate into your campaign. The intelligence gathered from your landscape analysis should set the creative parameters of your content strategy, and focus on developing content that has proven successful rates of engagement with your target audience.
For example:
Do keep in mind that the content is the foundation of the campaign, and so it helps to have something meaningful to say. This will assist in making it a two-way compaign that people will want to engage with.
Key considerations to keep in mind when developing a content strategy include:
For example:
- Developing 3 minute make up tutorial videos for your make-up artistry YouTube channel
- Releasing a series of images of 1950’s cars to your Instagram feed for your mechanic business
- Creating Facebook conversations around a series of topics concerning ‘red carpet fashion’ for your fashion label page.
Do keep in mind that the content is the foundation of the campaign, and so it helps to have something meaningful to say. This will assist in making it a two-way compaign that people will want to engage with.
Key considerations to keep in mind when developing a content strategy include:
- What does your audience care about?
- What do you as a business care about?
- What’s in the news? What’s trending?
- Will you create your own media or simply curate?
- Don’t plan too far ahead or the content may become irrelevant
- Craft content to each platform’s strengths
Dissemination
Dissemination involves using different social media platforms to distribute your content. When deciding which platforms to use it is important to consider the unique characteristics and advantages they each posses. In our technologies section we have included analyses of many of the different platforms as well as tips on how to use them to engage your target audience.
Engagement
Engagement revolves around proactively communicating with people and getting them excited about your organization and engaging with your content. Simply distributing the content and telling people about what you’re doing is not engagement – that is dissemination. If you have used the intelligence from your good landscape analysis to inform your content strategy, and also been mindful about choosing the right platforms through which to reach your target audience, then a level of engagement should occur naturally. If not, you need to go back and reassess where you went wrong.
There are a number of common errors people make that limit engagement. Ensure to keep the following in mind:
There are a number of common errors people make that limit engagement. Ensure to keep the following in mind:
- Ensure to keep a conversational tone. This will encourage people to conversate with you.
- Be consistent with your content distribution, otherwise you will be forgotten.
- Constantly monitor how well your audience is engaging with your content, and if they are particularly receptive to a particular type then focus on replicating that success.
Participation
Participation involves getting people to actually do something with your content, rather than simply talking about it or consuming it. It is a higher level of engagement that not all strategies and campaigns reach, but is common among the most successful cases. This can take a variety of forms and include:
Participation involves such a high level of engagement that the participants end up doing a lot of the leg works and marketing for you. This is not always easy to achieve, but a key point to remember is that in order for this to work you need to give people a certain level of control.
In order to measure the success of a strategy, it is important that you monitor and evaluate it throughout the duration of the campaign. Learn how to do this here.
- Having people come down to your campaign launch event
- Having people submit photos of themselves in clothes from your fashion label on your Facebook page
- Running competitions getting participants to design the new logo for your brand and pin them on your Pinterest board
Participation involves such a high level of engagement that the participants end up doing a lot of the leg works and marketing for you. This is not always easy to achieve, but a key point to remember is that in order for this to work you need to give people a certain level of control.
In order to measure the success of a strategy, it is important that you monitor and evaluate it throughout the duration of the campaign. Learn how to do this here.