Social media is no longer viewed as a supplemental tool or "good to have," but rather as an essential component of a brand's digital marketing strategy. Even so, many businesses find it difficult to transition from sporadic posting to a comprehensive social media approach that advances their corporate goals.
Just a few of the obstacles that prevent brands from creating a social media strategy that is in line with their objectives include time, resources, and priorities. In reality, 2018 research found that 50% of organizations admitted to not having a plan.
However, it is practically hard to determine the ROI of your brand's social media initiatives without the need for a strategy in place. So where would you even begin? The following information will teach you how to develop a social media plan for your company
How to Conduct an Audit?
Let's begin with the audit, which is a frequently missed initial step.
The basic idea behind an audit is that you can't create a successful plan of action without first reviewing your past results. A thorough audit will reveal your audience's demographics, the kinds of content they prefer (and dislike), and the degree to which they have engaged with your business.
Are you use this template or make your own to conduct the audit? What it should contain is as follows:
Name and URL for the profile
Number of followers
Frequency of posts
Information about the audience
Metrics of Engagement
Successful posts (type of post, engagement, URL)
Posts that perform poorly (type of post, engagement, URL)
For each channel that your organization owns, you will need to find a source for this data.
Note down any information that stands out to you. Are you shocked by the volume of views of footage of your CEO's conference speech received? Perhaps you were unaware of your audience's youth or the fact that many of your followers are from a particular nation. All of this knowledge will be useful when you begin to decide how you want to utilize social media in the future.
1. Set goals and develop metrics.
Following the completion of your social media audit, you ought to have a clearer idea of the strengths and areas for improvement of your brand. Start developing your goal-setting strategy right away. Start by deciding how you can utilize social media to assist the main goals your team has for the upcoming year.
Maybe your team is working to raise awareness, lower churn, and boost sales. If so, you might want to think about setting objectives like producing X leads, improving consumer involvement on social media by X%, and bringing X% more visitors to the company's site.
Here are some typical metrics to take into account while establishing your goals:
Clicks
Followers
Reach
Engagement
Don't feel obligated to predetermine your entire plan for the coming year. Start with a few specific objectives, then once you've made progress, add more.
2. Align with creative
At this point, talking to your creativity support is essential. It's simple to come up with new series concepts and make plans to increase your publishing frequency, but in practice, you are limited by the resources at your disposal.
Consult your graphic and content teams to learn more about how well they can complement social media. To ensure that each person is on the same side, guide them through the objectives you've set and how they serve the larger company objectives. Then, agree on a method for the deliverables.
There are several free tools available if you're working alone to make interesting social media graphics.
3. Implement a strategy
Without having a solid grasp on how to strategically and tactically implement a strategy, it cannot be considered complete.
The outcomes of your content inspection truly matter in this situation. For instance, you would want to think about utilizing Instagram to launch a new product or line if the audit showed that posts regarding your brand's products had the highest engagement from your Instagram followers.
Some Social Media Management Tools
Use a tool for managing social media and link management platforms to enhance your strategy and maximize the return on your investment.
Tracking click data is highly helpful because engagement is a crucial metric for gauging a brand's success on social media. Bitly Campaigns are used by many marketing teams, including Bitly's, to track cross-channel campaigns in real time. It provides you with information on how your content is doing throughout your social media channels so you can decide where to increase and where to decrease your efforts.
Regarding the social media management tool, there are so many options that it can be difficult to choose one. Here are some to think about:
Look for one that at least adheres to these four criteria and fits the needs of your brand:
Post Scheduling
Maintaining a regular posting schedule is made much easier by having the ability to plan your posts ahead of time and preview them before going live. Additionally, it lets you post at a time of your choosing and eases the pressure of needing to schedule posts during the day.
Analytics & Reporting
In addition to the native tools on your channels, we strongly advise leveraging the reporting and analytics features of your social media management platform. You'll get a more complete picture of your publishing performance and be in a better position to decide.
Social Listening
You can track hashtags, keywords, mentions, and even brand sentiment using a variety of management tools. You can learn more about the conversations being had about your brand and its rivals by using social listening.
Collaboration
Speaking of involving your community, collaborative response solutions can assist organizations and handling @mentions of your company, allowing you to examine and delegate messages to team members. (This is incredibly useful if your business receives a lot of messages on a variety of subjects—like inquiries, queries about your brand, and queries processed by various teams.)
4. Establish response guidelines
For many, the key to a successful social media strategy is organizing your affairs before you begin posting. But how do you respond to questions submitted through your brand's social media channels? What about grievances? a PR problem?
It's critical to have a mechanism in place for managing responses. To start, think about the most typical communication formats that businesses encounter on social media:
Brand-positive remarks
Negative remarks about brands
IT assistance - Questions about the brand's goods or services
Give each of these sections an owner. Several of them, if not all of them, may be handled by the same individual, but make sure to consult with relevant parties and answer any unanswered concerns.
5. Prioritize your strategy.
You've completed your audit, decided on your objectives and strategies, selected your tools, and defined your response protocols. How do you now order all of the tasks that must be completed?
Keep in mind: You can't accomplish everything at once. You'll be more productive and efficient if you have a focused, prioritized plan.
What is most important to your business's mission? Are there any significant due dates or milestones coming up soon? Determine what elements of your plan will be essential to setting the groundwork for your brand's social media presence and where the most pressing demands are.
There might not always be a correct response, in which case you will have to accept a compromise. When that happens, pick one or two objectives to concentrate on initially, then schedule some time on your calendar for after a few weeks to go over your other concepts once you've made some progress.
6. Decide on due dates and owners.
It's critical to keep track of all your tasks, assign them to team members, and set them due dates to hold yourself and your team accountable and ensure progress.
The process of determining who is accountable for what and how long they have to complete it can also assist you to determine where your plan needs to be improved. You might discover, for instance, that you need to allow yourself more leeway when it comes to deadlines or that you've forgotten to do some project-related duties.
You and your team can manage these changes and keep improving your overall plan with frequent check-ins.
7. Measure and refine
Finally, everything you've done up to this point has been done to help your team and business succeed while also achieving your social media marketing goals. The effectiveness of your efforts must therefore be periodically evaluated to ascertain what is generating social media ROI and what is not.
Social life moves swiftly. Some things will go as you had hoped (or better), while others won't live up to your expectations. It's your responsibility to make an effort to comprehend why so that you can modify your future objectives. You and your team will be able to move through this process in a more efficient—and painless—way if you have a solid social media plan.
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