Before you start putting content out on social media, you need to decide on a strategy. The first thing that you need to think about is what you want to achieve from it. Are you looking to increase the number of likes on your page, create more interaction on your page, increase overall brand awareness, drive traffic to your website or get signups to your lead magnet offer.
Without this direction in mind, you are going to find that you are scattered in your approach and will either fail or burnout trying to do too many things at once.
You’ve got to have a plan!
Setting Up Your Social Media Strategy
When deciding on your social media strategy, you need to make sure that it is inline with your overall company goals and values. It has to show those values and the ethos within what you do.
You need to also look at how social media can influence or help to complete your overall company goals, rather than just your social media goals. This makes it easier to complete as the two are intertwined and not in competition with one another.
So look at your company goals first. How can you create a social media strategy that will support or complete these goals?
Are you looking to expand into new market areas? Perhaps you have a new product that you want to launch. How can your social media campaign for this year help you to achieve these goals?
Who can you connect with using social media that can help you to do this? Do you need to connect with certain individuals or will you be better targeting an interest group for example?
Would you be able to do all of this organically or would you need to look at paid advertising to achieve this?
Free can be great, but sometimes you need to pay to get there quicker.
Breaking Down Your Goals
Once you have this all worked out, then you need to break your goals down into steps that you can take action on and decide by when you are going to have these done.
Goals need to have a date on them and you need to do whatever it takes to hit those goals by that allotted time.
Who are you going to target? How are you going to target them? When will you have your first few key influencers or your first 100 people from that interest type?
Also, what are you going to do once you’ve achieved that? What will it give you the ability to achieve by doing it?
If it isn’t going to make a difference to your business then is it a goal worth pursuing?
Then you need to look at the results that you are getting and see if you are on track to achieve them or if you need to change your tactics.
Prioritise your Goals
Once you have your goals laid out you need to prioritise. You need to decide in which order things need to happen so that you get the most benefit. It’s no good putting the eggs in after you take the cake out of the oven.
How much value is each goal going to bring to your company? How much effort is going to be required to achieve it? Can you pick one out that is going to give you the most benefit with the least required effort? That is going to accelerate your results.
Once you have your goals prioritised, it’s time to delegate and set your goals. If you are working on your own then this is the time to put things into your calendar.
You need to calculate how much time you have and how much each task will need then map that onto the corresponding time frame. If you have 2 weeks to complete task 1 and 4 weeks to complete task 2 then for the first 2 weeks task 1 needs to take priority with a small amount of time being also allocated to task 2. This means that as task 1 is completed your aren’t starting from the beginning with task 2 in case you have misjudged how long you will need to complete a bigger task.
I hope this has been of use to you and will help you to get your social media moving for the next 11 months.