According to Dream grow, 95% of Online adults aged 18-34 are most likely to follow a brand via social networking, and 71% of consumers who have had a good social media service experience with a brand are likely to recommend it to others.
So it’s not hard to believe that 92% of retail brands use at least 2 social media platforms or more to connect to their audience base.
But firstly, you need a strategy!
Social media strategies can be confusing, especially when it comes to calculating your ROI. I like to see social media as a way to connect with my audience base and to raise my brand awareness.
If you’re thinking more along the lines ‘How much money can we make from Twitter this month’ then you’ll likely to be disappointed.
But if you’re willing to invest the time getting to know what makes your audience tick, and engage with them, then it definitely can boost your traffic and brand awareness, and these are the key ingredients that can lead to sales!
Here are my 6 simple social media steps!
1. Create Your Goals
Here are just a few goals you could consider for your content marketing strategy. Did you know that people who write down their goals are likely to be 33 times more successful than someone who doesn’t?
- Brand awareness
- More traffic to your business blog
- Community Engagement
- More newsletter subscribers
- Create a loyal fanbase
- Increase retention
2. Research your audience
Nearly 79% of adults use Facebook, but how many REALLY engage with your business page? Remember that the majority of people use Facebook to connect with family & friends, NOT brands and that’s why you need to understand where to find your audience base and how to engage withe them.
- Understand the general demographics for each social media platform. If your target market is 60 years plus, then using Instagram may not be the best audience considering most of their audience is within the 18-29 years bracket.
- Where is your audience based?
- What do they like to do in their time off work? Hobbies & Interests?
- What is their professional/ Employment status?
- Which social media platforms do they like to hang out in on their time off?
3. Establish Key Metrics
This will give you a better idea of your ROI. It can be tricky to track social media progress but there are some key elements that can help you along the way.
- How many weekly impressions did you post receive?
- How many likes?
- How many people engaged with your content?
- How much of your traffic came from your social media platforms?
- How much reach did your Tweets have?
4. Research your competitive landscape
Researching your competitors can give you so much information! Brands that are well evolved have already done all the hard work in finding their niche market and you can tap into this too. Then, once you get the basics down, you can make it your own!
- What platforms do they get the most engagement from?
- Do they have a similar audience base to you?
- Which content receives the most engagement?
- Do they hold competitions on their Facebook pages?
- Can you follow and engage with their Twitter followers?
5. Creating your content
You can manage your content by using scheduling platforms such as Buffer or Hootsuite but remember that unless you log in to engage for at least 15 minutes a day, it’s unlikely your account will receive any attention! When creating your content you want to think about;
- Using Twitter lists for your influencers to see their most popular tweets
- Create a list purely for interesting content
- Researching on Buzzfeed content using keywords, what was the most popular post?
- Remember content with images and videos will receive triple the engagement
- Do you incorporate Facebook live and Instastories too?
- Will you post on trending topics?
Then pop in daily to Engage, Engage, Engage!!
6. Tracking your results
Around 80% of marketers find it difficult to work out how much revenue their efforts actually created and tend to monitor engagement. To get you started think about;
- How many likes did your content receive?
- Did any sales from google analytics come from Social media?
- Did you have a high number of newsletter signs ups and which traffic source did they come from?
- Can you see an overall increase in Twitter followers and impressions?
- Are more people visiting your Twitter profile?
- Did you receive anymore Facebook page likes?
Ok so here is just a quick snapshot of the basic 6 step social media strategy.
Do you need help to create your own strategy? Get in touch!