Do you fancy developing a social media strategy on your own, or are you just curious about what the process involves? Social media can be very time consuming and so focusing your efforts on having a clear strategy will help to achieve successful outcomes.
Having researched several social media strategy guides, articles, blogs, videos and podcasts, one of the top ranking resources found is courtesy of global award winning NP Digital, a performance marketing agency based in the USA. Neil Patel, the CEO of NP Digital has produced a helpful 8 minute video that breaks down creating a social media strategy into an easy, practical and SMART formula. Here it is summarised with added commentary and links to some useful marketing tools:
- Set your goals and make them SMART goals i.e. specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and time-bound. Think about how these goals can relate to and benefit your ideal audience e.g. to gain more website traffic from a particular audience to a specific landing page to increase registrations for a specific event, product or service etc.
- Select the most appropriate social media channels to help achieve your goals.
- Do a social media audit – focus on what’s going well that you can do more of; including an understanding of the most engaging types of social media posts as well as the most effective days, times and frequency of posts.
- Create a profile of your ideal audience that’s relevant to your brand, values, and products or services.
- Understand your competitors. Research, what, where, when, how and for whom they are doing much better. How can you emulate this?
- Create lists of content ideas that work best for each social media channel.
- Create a content calendar and seasonal marketing tactics. Manage implementation of social media posts using a project managing tool like Monday.com and graphic design tool like Canva.
- Use a social media planning tool like Hootsuite to implement, track and analyse your efforts. Review all of the above elements of your documented social media strategy once or twice a year; and focus on improving your efforts.
For an even more in-depth guide, take a look at Hootsuite’s fantastic social media strategy article that also has videos and free templates.
[ Photo by Andrea Piacquadio ]