The Cheat Sheet to a Killer Social Media Strategy
While many companies treated social media as a temporary trend during its early years, it has proven to be a cornerstone of effective digital marketing strategies for nearly any industry. From its early success emerged more opportunity, technological advancements, heightened targeting capabilities, and a more organic way to reach potential customers and field questions or concerns.
Today, social media requires some tactful thinking and creative juices — it needs a killer strategy. Fortunately for you, we've been in the social media ecosystem for years and are pros at helping some of the most successful companies manage their profiles, pages, and audiences. We're here to give you a comprehensive cheat sheet to crafting a social media strategy that works!
But first, in order to see where we're headed, we have to take a look at where it all came from. Let's check out some brief history in the realm of social media.
How Did We Get Here?
Believe it or not, social media is not a new construct. While technically we could consider Morse code a rudimentary form of social media — it's more or less a type of messaging rather than an outlet to a wider audience.
The Beginning
So, we're going to start with what we believe to be the very first social media platform — the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET). Now, by today's standards, this is nothing special — but for 1969, it was revolutionary. Four interconnected university scientists could share data and software amongst one another.
Following this achievement and the expansion of the pre-internet and modern internet came a laundry list of social innovations and services accessible in the digital world.
Six Degrees profile (1997)
Friendster (2001)
LinkedIn (2002)
Myspace (2006)
Now, there were certainly other players in the social arena during this time, but these were the most popular and influential.
Bridging The Gap
If we were to hop in a time machine and go back to the early days of social media, where AOL instant messenger (AIM) and more expansive platforms like Myspace ruled the internet — no one was prepared for the wave ahead.
While Myspace was certainly a goliath in the early 2000s, it was quickly overrun by Facebook, which is now the largest and most influential social media platform in history. While our pal Zuckerberg wasn't even close to being the first social media mogul to take advantage of marketing — the approach taken by Facebook would change the game forever.
With over 1.7 billion users, Facebook sought to utilize the marketing arena its platform had created by utilizing targeted data. Following in Facebook's footsteps, we now have social media giants like:
Instagram
Twitter
LinkedIn
Snapchat
Youtube
Pinterest
These have all become incredibly valuable landscapes for marketers to mine information about their target audience, display influential advertising campaigns, and relate more organically to their market. However, as we've mentioned, it takes a strategy — which is why you're here. So, let's dive into what you can do to craft a successful social media strategy for your business today.
Picking Your Platforms
Before you start creating months of content and firing it out into the digital world — you need to know which social media platforms work best for your business. Each channel has its fair share of pros and cons for your brand. We're going to go over some of the top competitors in the current marketplace so that you can better understand how to take advantage of their platform, tools, and tone for your business.
As the largest social media platform, Facebook boasts an incredible selection of tools and services to help marketers target its users. By creating a Business Manager account with your page, you'll gain access to a wide range of marketing tools for campaigns, advertisements, analytics and more!
We recommend Facebook for nearly any business, as it has such a massive user-base, a variety of ways to interact with potential customers, and seamless integration with other notable platforms.
For businesses that thrive on visual marketing practices, Instagram is a must. It's a great platform for sharing photos, graphics, videos, and even live streams to your audience. Creating a business account is simple and gives you access to user-friendly analytics and advertising capabilities.
If you have a product or service that people should see in action or behind the scenes, Instagram offers an extraordinary platform for reaching and interacting with your potential or current customer base.
Business owners are fairly familiar with the intricacies of LinkedIn's expansive user network, but what about the marketing side? Not only is it a fantastic resource for hiring and sharing informative company news, but it's also set up for highly targeted campaigns. Through LinkedIn, you can create professional content to help network, expand on thought leadership, and take advantage of this B2B powerhouse's full potential.
Now, LinkedIn marketing isn't for every business — and caters more towards B2B companies. You also have to be mindful of your tone and messaging, as it's a much more professional landscape than some of the other social media platforms like Facebook or Instagram.
YouTube
While many don't think of the world's second-largest search engine as a social media platform, it too has some incredible targeting tools marketers can utilize for success. For video content, there's no greater place than YouTube with its built-in search functionality and a wide range of tools to help marketers target the right audience. You can post rich media chock-full of content your potential audience will love.
Whether it's informative or educational content, product demos or unboxings, animations, entertainment, interviews, and even testimonials — the sky's the limit. Every industry can benefit from Youtube's platform; just be sure to craft your content with an audience in mind. Keep in mind, YouTube's incredible rise in popularity competes with Facebook's video services, so posting YouTube links on Facebook can actually deter your efforts on the platform!
Another one of the social media giants is Twitter, a news sharing platform that is great for reeling in crucial information or news around your topic and seeing what your audience is thinking. However, compared to others on this list, the marketing potential is difficult to take advantage of — as user feeds are filled to the brim with content and posts by the second.
With that in mind, it's not a platform to ignore. Many customer service interactions happen through Twitter, which makes it the perfect platform to stay connected and field concerns with your customers. When it comes to creating an all-around customer experience — Twitter is a must for responding to your audience in their language.
Building a Social Media Strategy
Now that you have a better understanding of the platforms you can take advantage of, it's time to start your journey to building a killer social media strategy. Unless you're already an established enterprise with a massive social media audience — you need some tips to build your brand awareness. Social media has the tools needed to start getting your brand out there and into consumers' minds.
Outline your branding so that you have a clear picture of core values, voice, and tone. This includes your social media pages' internals such as your avatar, banner images, location bios, and contact information. Be unique, stand out, but most importantly — BE YOURSELF.
Know your target demographic from top to bottom. You can't craft an effective social media strategy without knowing who you're targeting. Many of these platforms have business analytics tools that are there to help, don't ignore them!
Know the trends and stay ahead of the curve. While today, videos and other forms of visual marketing are the most popular — it's also important to look ahead at the future. There could be opportunities in the voice search game, live streams, or short-form videos like TikTok or Instagram Reels.
Don't ignore your audience or potential customers — engage with them! Answer questions, shout out others in your space, engage in discussions, host contests, and even partner with other brands. You need to stay top of mind to boost your brand awareness, and this requires community engagement.
Post consistently, or you'll fall behind and out of the minds of your followers. Building a social media following or boosting brand awareness takes time. Even viral sensations from brands that seem "out of the blue" were well-thought, with subsequent ideas to follow suit. Make a schedule and use tools like Buffer, Hootsuite, or Sprout Social to schedule posts and push consistent content.
Last Stop: Trust
Even after you've created an effective social media strategy and the ball is rolling, you're not finished quite yet. The last stop on the social media express is building trust and creating advocates for your brand through your content. Now, this takes time and a ton of effort — but it's most certainly the goal for any brand that's looking to take social media marketing seriously this year.
So, how do you build trust?
Well, it starts with the five foundations we laid out in our guide to building trust through social media. These are great implementations in your overall social media strategy that will boost trust in the long-run.
Be Authentic
You should be taking advantage of what makes your brand unique and your brand values. Brand, or company values, play a crucial role in authenticity and are what will truly set your social media presence apart from the competition in your industry. Here are some tips if you'd like to know more about staying true to your brand's roots.
Stay Transparent
The modern customer is informed and will research brands to see if their values match their efforts. One way to mitigate a potential PR disaster is to stay transparent and open through social media. If you followed tip #1, you should already be staying true to your values. Now, you have to open up doors so that potential customers can see what you're all about. You can use social media strategies and content to your advantage, posting about product development, distribution, research, employees — and so much more.
Empathetic Responses
Whether it's through Twitter or other responsive platforms, you should take social media as an opportunity to respond with empathy. If your followers bring up concerns, problems, or criticism — it's an opportunity to solve issues with eyes on your brand. This goes a long way in creating trust and building advocacy for your company, as it shows how much you care about every customer experience from start to finish. Social media is a fantastic environment for sharing awesome content, but it also allows for empathetic engagement.
Build Your Network
If you want to build advocates for your brand, you'll need to seek reliable advocates. Influencers play an important role in the social media landscape, and discovering ones that are in your buyer personas will help get the ball rolling in targeting their audience. However, before you go throwing cash at every account with thousands or millions of followers, you should make sure that your product or service is something they genuinely appreciate so that their efforts are authentic.
Start Creating Your Content Strategy
Now that you have all of the foundations down — start getting to work! Don't just throw content out there expecting results; you need to create a robust strategy with goals in mind. Create realistic expectations and then make a plan of attack. Here are some final tips we'll give for what it takes to craft the perfect content strategy.
Set goals and KPIs
Know your audience on each platform
Search keywords and hashtags to better understand buyer personas
Map out your buyer journey from start to finish
Create a distribution (posting) strategy for each platform
Look up content posting platforms that work best for your company
Stick to your values
Get to work!
Social media will only continue to get more and more influential with purchasing behavior, and there's no time like the present to create a content strategy or start fine-tuning your existing tactics.
