If you’re new to social media then the best thing to start with is a ‘competitor analysis’. If you’re aware of your competitors and the industry experts in your field (which you should be by now! If not contact WMiW to create a competitor analysis for you) then search for them on social media and see what presence they have, how active they are and what their tone and content says about their brand. Once you are aware of this, you will be able to create a strategy and see how you can mimic and better their content plan.
Maintaining a strong social media presence isn’t easy but being successful in managing your chosen platforms can lead to an increase in awareness, a larger audience, engagement boost, more traffic to your site which can lead to more business and new clients. Having a social media strategy can gain your company new leads.
To help you out, WMiW has created a social media marketing list;
Explore Content Opportunities
- See what the latest trends are in your industry
- Explore platforms that would suit your business (e.g. would Pinterest be better than Instagram for bringing you more potential clients?)
- Experiment with different tones and content styles on each of your chosen social media platforms
- Get your team to have input on social media: “What would you want to read?”
Plan Your Social Media Strategy
- Input key dates into your content calendar to ensure you don’t miss out on any campaign opportunities
- See what content needs to be repeated to ensure maximum audience reach
- Decide on your chosen social media platforms and create a persona for each (they can be the same … however, not recommended for LInkedIn if you’re using a chatty tone on Twitter)
- Decide on how frequently you should be posting – go back to this point in a month and see if this has been working for you
- Create social media goals
Analyse Your Activity
- Are you happy with your engagement rates?
- Have you been following the content calendar? If not, why not?
- Are you replying to users’ comments?
- Are you monitoring your brand’s social accounts?
- Do you use all your social accounts consistently? If not, why not?
- What are your response rates like? What action do you take if there is an urgent issue on your platform?
- Do you need to use social media for customer service?
Evaluate Your Social Media Marketing Plan
- Were your goals realistic? Did you meet them?
- Have you looked at your social media reports? What did you see? Do you need to change the time / frequencies of your posts?
- Plan new KPIs
- Align social media marketing KPIs with your marketing strategy