Three Key Strategies Needed for Your Brand’s Social Media Campaign
Analyze your current strategy and social media activity
In preparation for your social media strategy and goals, it is beneficial to review and analyze your current social media page engagement. By doing this you discover what posts are working for your page and what kind of posts are not working. You can compare and contrast the engagement of likes and comments.
A good question to ask yourself is, “What time are my followers active on social media?” When having your Instagram set to a business page you can see when your followers are most active on the social media platform. This tool is beneficial for you to evaluate the peak times. Adding the timing of your posts to be at the same peak time of your followers being active on the app will boost your engagement.
Another question to ask yourself when evaluating your social media is, “Am I using SMART goals?” SMART goals are good to use in setting your goals as they assist in building your social media strategy.
SMART Goals
After completing your analysis of your brand’s social media platform, you can begin building your goals and strategies. When creating your goals and strategies it is important to incorporate SMART goals which are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound. Hootsuite uses the example of a SMART goal to be worded as, “We will use Twitter for customer support and lower our average response rate to under two hours by the end of the quarter.”
SMART goals are guidelines to help you to come up with strategies that can be measured. HubSpot explains when measuring the results it is helpful to use metrics that are easy for your pull and understand. “Examples of simple metrics (to start with) include net new fans and followers, number of interactions, and visits to your website from social.
Create Content for Followers
Increase brand awareness
This means fewer promotional posts and more posts about who the brand is and how they can help their followers. Sprout Social explains it best, “To create authentic and lasting brand awareness, avoid solely publishing promotional messages. Instead, focus on content that emphasizes your personality and values first.”
Discover User-Generated Content
Are your followers creating content about your product or tagging your brand? If yes, share the content on your brand’s social media posts and stories. Interact with the user’s post in the comments. Interacting with your followers and customers shows the brand cares about them. By commenting on other pages will help other accounts find you and increase your follower count.
Boost Engagement
When creating content for your followers in mind, HubSpot recommends hosting contests on your page. A popular way of hosting giveaways on Instagram is having users tag others in the post. This is a way to increase the likes and comments of a post. It also can increase follower count as the rules to enter the giveaway can be to follow your account.
What if I do not use a social media strategy?
When not having a social media strategy you will not have a well-thought plan for your social media content. Without a strategy and understanding of the goals of the content, you do not know if your social media posts are making an impact on your audience. It also can make it difficult to plan your social media post and understand why you are posting the content you have created.
Start building a social media strategy for your brand by analyzing your current content, creating smart goals, and create content for your followers.
Final Thoughts
Analyzing your content to understand what is working for your engagement is a good first step. Using the information you gathered in your analysis you can begin building your social media goals and strategy. Once you understand your goals, begin creating content with followers in mind and not exclusively on sales or promotional posts.
