For many people, social media is a place where they can share their lives, talents, and interests with others. It is a vibrant cultural space that is continually shaping and reshaping trends and conversations, and has a profound impact on all of our daily lives. For businesses, social media can be one of the most effective ways to organically create meaningful traffic and bring brand loyalty to new heights. The feeling of intimacy and personal connection that it can create makes it uniquely distinct from traditional marketing, and it has become an absolutely essential part of any brand’s PR and marketing mix.
However, running the social media page for a business is not just about posting whatever comes to mind. It is a highly strategic operation that requires an equal balance of strategy and creativity. The various social media platforms all offer different benefits and drawbacks, and it is crucial to craft an engaging and dynamic strategy that makes the most of what these various platforms offer. Moreover, it’s important to understand that not all social media platforms are the right fit for your brand, as different audiences tend to frequent certain platforms for specific reasons. For example, Facebook and Instagram tend to skew towards consumer brands, while B2B brands often get the most value out of LinkedIn. Knowing which platforms to invest in and tailoring your posts to suit their unique traits greatly improves the impact of these campaigns. While good-quality content will form the backbone of any successful social media strategy, there are also a number of other important considerations that are critical to ensuring success.
Following are some of the major elements of any social media marketing strategy:
Audience Research
One of social media’s greatest strengths is its ability to build more direct and personal connections between brands and their audience. It is a uniquely flexible form of content-sharing that encourages a personal and reciprocal relationship between the creator and their audience. When performed effectively, social media marketing not only encourages audiences to buy your product, but to share their experiences and feel like a part of a community.
In order to cultivate this dynamic and welcoming space, it is pivotal to gain a deep understanding of exactly who your target audience is, and, with this in mind, how you can best reach them. Accomplishing this goal requires a delicate balance of art and science. On the art side, working to create a distinctive and authentic voice for your brand will help you stand out from the competition and establish a clear, relatable brand identity. It will allow you to create content that resonates with your audience on an emotional level and speaks to what they truly care about, allowing you to cultivate deeper and more lasting brand loyalty. On the science side, gathering data about when and how your audience engages with social media will help you craft a plan that feels tailored to their needs and interests. Knowing what platforms they frequent, what forms of content they prefer (short form video, infographics, etc.), and what times of day they are most likely to check their feeds ensures that your content feels relevant, timely, and impactful.
Content Strategy
Operating social media pages for a brand requires a drastically different approach from posting on a personal account. While many of us use our personal social media accounts to share our thoughts and experiences in real time, marketing-focused social media requires a far more intentional and strategic way of posting. In order to maximize exposure while also cultivating quality interactions, it’s important to develop a data-driven plan that optimizes your content delivery. For example, crafting quality content does little to further your brand’s goals if your audience is not seeing that content on their feeds. On the flip side, posting so much content that your brand is all that your audience sees can reduce goodwill with your followers and may cause them to mute your content or unfollow you altogether. To avoid these outcomes, brands should make a point of posting consistently rather than constantly and focus on quality over quantity.
An effective content strategy will begin by clearly laying out the goals you hope to achieve. These goals can range from generating leads and increasing website traffic to increasing community engagement and improving your brand's image. With these goals in place, you can then begin to strategize about what forms of content will best achieve these goals. A flexible approach that combines a variety of formats and integrates forms unique to social media, such as user-generated content and influencer partnerships, helps maintain interest over the long term and promotes a well-rounded image of your brand. Creating a content calendar is an excellent way to guarantee consistency and to ensure that your content is sufficiently diverse to maintain your audiences' interest.
Engagement
Another one of social media’s unique advantages is that it is not structured like a monologue in which a brand simply delivers content to their audience. Instead, it is a tool that allows ongoing, real-time dialogue to become a part of the campaign itself. Not only do your followers’ comments act as a kind of direct, real-time feedback on your content, but they present a fantastic opportunity to cultivate deeper and more personal relationships with your following. Consistently responding to comments and adopting a friendly yet professional tone helps your audience feel seen and heard. This creates the impression that they are not simply being marketed at, but participating in a community in which their input and thoughts are genuinely valued.
One of the best ways to participate in these enriching conversations is to actively encourage them through your content itself. While traditional photo posts and short form video are the cornerstone of most social media strategies, integrating other forms of content such as stories, contests, quizzes, and questions can actively encourage your audience to comment and share their thoughts. Different social media platforms are especially well-adapted to various forms of interactive content, so developing a diversified strategy that makes use of the various platforms' unique capabilities will help your brand cultivate consistent and high-quality engagement.
Analytics
As with any marketing campaign, social media marketing requires careful tracking of analytics in order to ensure maximum precision and impact. While virtually all platforms have easily accessible statistics for likes, shares, and comments, there are a number of other crucial metrics to take account of when crafting and adjusting your content strategy. Simply knowing how a piece of content performed is not enough: analytics empower you to delve into the underlying reasons why a given piece of content performed the way it did, and allows you to effectively compare performance across different posts. By critically analyzing these differences, you can adjust your strategy to optimize post performance and ensure that your content is adequately serving your goals.
Analytics can also help you compare your performance with that of your competition. This allows you to refine your content strategy by not only focusing on what does and doesn’t work for your brand, but for other brands in your industry as well. This macro-level view of the competition allows you to effectively distinguish yourself from other brands and ensure that you are achieving a strong share of voice in your industry. These essential insights can help you tailor your campaigns for maximum impact and consistency.
Trend Adaptation
Social media trends have the unique power to extend their influence beyond the platforms themselves, becoming a part of our pop culture and everyday vocabulary. While not every trend will fit with your brand’s existing image and messaging, engaging in popular social media trends can help your content stand out in the algorithm and boost engagement. Having a creative take on the trend that captures your brand’s unique voice and speaks directly to your target audience will help increase the impact of these posts, as merely following the trend without putting any spin on it may decrease the quality of the engagement with your audience.
It is also critical to stay on top of any changes to social media platforms themselves. The algorithms that these platforms use are continually changing in response to new trends and dynamics, and the way they decide what content will gain exposure should shape your content schedule. Take Instagram for example: with the advent of reels, short-form video posts gained much heavier exposure in the algorithm than traditional still posts. Keeping track of these broader shifts will ensure that your content does not fall by the wayside as these platforms develop over time.
Stopping the Scroll
Today’s social media users are so inundated with content across such a wide variety of platforms that it can be difficult to grab their attention. With so many brands, creators, and individuals all vying for likes and shares, many users are simply scrolling past much of what they see. In order to unlock the powerful benefits of social media, you need to create content that causes people to stop, look, and engage.
Stopping the scroll requires more than well-made and creative content. It takes an awareness of how these platforms work and why certain content performs better than other content. It requires careful strategy and timing, and a knack for putting a creative spin on emerging trends. When done correctly, a well-planned and well-executed social media strategy can take your brand from anonymity to virality, which, in today’s climate, can help you elevate your business to new heights.
Discover how Mackasey Howard Communications can assist you in crafting a successful social media strategy.
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