Are your social media goals a distant memory?
You need a social media strategy!
Whether you are a sales professional, massage therapist or healthcare provider, your business deserves a social media presence that supports and encourages growth.
imagine if you could:
- Wake up each day with a strategy in place that created clarity of purpose?
- Know who your target audience is, where to find them and how to best position your content for maximum exposure?
- Have a plan in place that didn’t require hours of wasted time on social media?
- Execute on a social media strategy that produces significant results without it feeling difficult or overwhelming?
That’s what putting a social media marketing strategy in place can do!
Below are three tips to supercharge your strategy and create a consistent message with superior results!
Supercharge Your Social Media Marketing Strategy
1. Identify Goals and Objectives
The words goal and objective are often confused, especially when it comes to social media marketing. While they both relate to what you want to achieve, they differ in the how, when, and what.
Think of it like this: the goal is what you are working towards; the objectives are the steps you will take to get there.
For example, if you run a social media marketing blog, your goal might be:
“Become the industry destination for all business professionals seeking tips, tools and strategies that support the successful use and implementation of social media marketing within their business.”
In order to achieve that goal, your objectives might look something like this:
- Hire ten social media experts to share real-life case studies that clearly substantiate the value of social media use for business
- Join three top networking groups to increase visibility and awareness of the blog and it’s purpose
- Drive targeted traffic to the blog
- Increase blog subscription conversion by twenty-five percent
Your goals and objectives will vary dependent on your mission, long-term and short-term vision, audience, and product or service.
The important thing is to take the time to outline your top goals. Those goals, that when achieved would propel your business forward.
Build out your goals with this social media strategy worksheet from Exact Target by Sales Force.
2. Create Bite-Sized Action Steps
Now that you know what you’re working towards, break those goals and objectives down into manageable action steps.
In other words, how will you get from:
- Point A (implementation) to
- Point B (execution) to
- Point C (conversion)
Based on the goals and objectives above, the action steps required might be:
- Utilize the top six social media channels – Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, and LinkedIn to create an integrated social media marketing campaign that supports growth.
- Use various forms of content to get company message positioned properly on each social network.
-
- i. Images (marketing collateral, blog graphics)
- Text (blog posts)
- Audio (podcasts)
- Video (Google hangouts)
- Conduct an audience survey to determine where to expand, grow, and diversify company social media presence during each quarter of the year.
- Identify 10 industry pages with significant reach within the real estate community and build a relationship by liking and commenting on their posts with a goal of raising awareness about our page and driving traffic back through our hyperlink.
- Engage fans and followers through giveaways and sweepstakes such as a social media business plan or analysis.
- Monitor trends, characteristics and top posts through analytics and insights. Tweak posts to meet the needs of each social channel fan and follower base.
Next step: Now that you know what you are trying to achieve, put a plan in place to monitor key metrics. For example:
- Referrals from social channels
- Leads coming from Facebook page
- Mentions across social media
- Audience/community growth
- New blog subscribers
Now build it out in a basic spreadsheet. Here’s a sample social media strategy for Twitter:
3. Build Out Your Plan of Attack
One you’ve created your goals, objectives and action steps, it’s time to flesh out the details.
How will each social channel, including Facebook, Google+, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and Pinterest support and promote your overall plan?
Create a winning social media strategy that caters to the unique needs of your potential client!
Build out your daily plan of attack into daily and weekly to-do’s.
Here’s an example of what that might look like:
Facebook and Google Plus
- Post on business page once per day including articles, tips, how-to’s, video tutorials, and other people’s content that’s relevant to your fans and followers.
- Join three relevant groups and communities. For example, find local networks that include business professionals similar to your line of work. Begin to interact by commenting or posting interesting content at least once per day.
- Go through monitored keywords (e.g. industry terms, business name, local keyword phrases) and respond to any tweets
- Use third-party tool such as Social Bro to follow relevant people back
- Thank retweets
- Use lists to follow key people within industry or niche
- Update status once per day
- Accept relevant invitations
- Provide 1 recommendation where appropriate
- Share three to five pins and add them to strategically named boards
- Repin three others pins that followers would fight interesting
- Find five new people within industry, field or niche to follow
Setting up a proper strategy on the front-end will reduce many headaches down the road.
Take the time to strategically design and implement your social media strategy, then determine how you will stay consistent in your efforts.
The important thing is to know your limitations and what you can commit to without over-extending yourself. Using a social media editorial calendar will keep you focused and on track so you don’t become overwhelmed.
Not sure where to get started? Read these great tips from Peg Fitzpatrick!
Conclusion
If you’re eager to improve your social media results, implementing and executing upon a strategy can bring extraordinary results. But a strategy only works if you commit to working it.
Two additional tips before you dive in:
- Maintain a focus on areas of authority. What is your specialty, service or skill-set? Building authority via social media requires an unwavering commitment to consistently sharing knowledge based on your particular expertise.
- Once you have your strategy in place, continue to add adjust and modify. This will keep your message fresh and your content relevant.
Thank you for this useful post Rebekah! Breaking down your goals and objectives can be a great way to attained them just in time, simple steps could go further just hung up a bit then your done. Great Tips!
Thank you for reasonable points on social media marketing! As a founder of startup I think that some part of work in sales and marketing should be outsourced. You can make a smaller investment to building your marketing plan until your growth provides the cash flow needed to hire more permanent staffing. Also, you often need the expertise of more knowledgeable professionals providing strategic growth plans and your budget doesn’t not allow for that level of investment for the long term. I was working Ignite http://ignitecloudware.com It seems to be reliable and competent company.
Another Bulls Eye Rebekah. Its difficult for most small business owners to leverage SMM (if) they go about it in an ad hoc manner. Having an action plan that strived to meet the documented objectives and goals makes all the difference in the world. The trick is to keep fine tuning the processes and measure tangible results so you don’t lose momentum and motivation to keep on keeping on.
Wonderfully written and easy. Thanks for the great article.
Great post Rebekah… I think knowing why you are doing something is SO important AKA objectives as it will shape and drive what you do and give it some form, I see a lot of people thinking social media marketing is just for when they have a spare moment to use their smart phone… great tips here which are really useful and great to refresh all round – thanks!
Terrific tips Rebekah. I find 2 things that work exceptionally well for me are a task list that I can check things off (gives me a sense of accomplishment) and working backward from my main goal.
Great news for all. I’m really thankful to see the news. These ways are Very inspiring, motivating, interesting and really effective to create a social media marketing strategy. Thanks a lot for sharing the news.
media strategy
Hi Rebekah,
What a great tutorial for collecting those scattered thoughts and putting them to work for us! This will be very helpful.
Willena
Hey Rebekah,
My first official comment on your blog 🙂 I like how you’ve shared a great part of your strategy and referred to valuable resources such as SocialBro (I’d also check out Manage Flitter) and love the daily plan of attack. As an aside, do you use any tools to schedule your pins on Pinterest or is it a manual process? There was an announcement today that Viraltag and HootSuite will soon have the capability of scheduling pins.
YAY Kapil – thank you for stopping by and sharing your thoughts! I don’t use any tools to schedule my pins on Pinterest, but you can try Pinwoot or GoPixel. I’ve heard good things about both.
Hi Rebekah,
I love, love this post and it hits just the spot for me. I have been bopping around across a few social media platforms for years without any aim. I was just throwing ‘stuff’ out there hoping that something stuck. It started off with the loose goal of ‘meeting people who will eventually give me money’. I did broaden that a bit; however, the goal remained vague until about three weeks ago. I now have a plan but it still needs some refinement.
I learned a lot in this post and appreciate your sharing your knowledge and the tools.
Hi Rebekah,
I have read various social media related articles but never found one like this. You made is so much useful by sharing your own personal way of doing marketing. After reading this article, I know how to approach social media marketing in the right way and accomplish your goals.
Thank you Aahna! I’m happy to hear it was helpful!
Rebekah,
Excellent work, and sorely needed, judging by the plethora of people running their social media campaigns with no real plan, strategic or otherwise. On point 1, objectives should be quantifiable, with concrete numbers.
Editorial calendars are SOP for print media, blogs, and other media outlets. There’s no reason they shouldn’t be with social media as well. After all, that’s just another media outlet now.
Also, thanks for pointing out the importance of specific metrics.
Highly useful post, thanks.
Steve
Hi Steve! I completely agree.
Being able to identify and quantify your objectives is a big piece to social media marketing that most people miss. Then they wonder why there’s no way to judge or measure ROI.
Rebekah
Thanks so much for sharing your way of planning social media goals settings.
Your strategy shared will help me a lot since I am one of this people that I do not have any so far… but as they say, there is hope hahah 🙂
The sample social media strategy sheet you have shared for planning it out will be my bible for this…will be very much used by me hahahah 🙂 THANKS!!!
Thank you so much again for your support and for sharing all these great things for everyone interested to benefit.
_nickc
Hey Rebekah
I love the way you have shared the importance of planning and goal setting when it comes to social media strategy. Most people don’t do that and honestly speaking I am also guilty of that to some extent.
I love the sheet you shared for planning it out! Thank you for sharing to add value! Have a successful new week!
Regards,
Kumar
Rebekah, Thank you so much for sharing these wonderful tips and strategies! I hope to implement some of them in the coming weeks. I’d be interested in reading a post about what you do with competitors social media strategies, how you monitor them, if you set any goals based on them, etc.
Interesting article on the strategies for social media. I always find it best to narrow down the objectives even further. From my experience having more than 2 social media objectives requires a lot more investment and less focus. Having a strong and clear objective allows for a clearer and cleaner target objective.
Hey Rebekah
Nice to have an insight into how YOU go about planning a social media strategy. And to have a sheet to plan it out too! great stuff.
When I have my next customer that needs a plan, I will know how to do it.
Of course I can spice up mine as well while i am at it
thanks for the tips
ashley
Nice tips Rebekah, and I’m a big fan of editorial calendars to keep both the message and the content on track. Without one the message becomes muddled and misses the target market.
Monitoring is also important as people tend not to focus so much on conversion but conversation, and whilst both are important, one directly impacts the bottom line of the business.
Hello Rebekah! What a great post! I have really been working hard on my social media strategy since the first of the year. I do believe the important this is to be consistent. It is a lot of work but it is starting to pay off. I love your suggestion to build it out in a basic spreadsheet, I think this is really going to help me figure out what times are working better then others.
Love It Love it thanks for sharing.. Chery :))
Rebekah,
The more information you are freely giving away, the more the reader realizes that it may be beneficial to invest in your services. A person who is working full time cannot possibly do all this work every day to build their business further. If you are working “in” the business it can be really hard to work “on” the business.
Thanks for another wonderful post.
Warmly,
Dr. Erica
That’s such a great point and I completely agree. The more you can give away, the more valuable you become to the reader or social media follower.
So true about working in and on your business. It’s something I struggle with everyday.
Rebekah, Your suggestions are going to really help me clearly put together a social media marketing plan for my business. I am already doing some of the things you suggest but I have much more that I can accomplish and your tips will be great for helping me. Thanks!
YAY – that’s terrific to hear Shelley!
Some things that I really need to pay attention to… I know that I need to have a plan and then execute it with full intentions.. Thanks for the tips… I will keep an eye on this and make a decision real soon to follow your wonderful tips!!
Hi Holly! It is all about planning and execution and then doing it consistently. Have fun with the implementation!