We present the 6 steps you must follow to create a social media strategy for your business or brand.

There is no doubt that today we are all on social networks a good part of the day, so they have become an important part of any advertising strategy. If you are interested in integrating them into your digital marketing plan, stay tuned because we are going to give you the best tips on how to create a social media strategy for your brand, so you can make the most of its potential.

1. Define your objectives and strategies

As in everything, the first step to success is always planning. Setting out what your objectives are and how you plan to achieve them will help you to work more focused and therefore more efficient.

If you are not very clear about what you want or what you can expect from your social media presence, you can review the following list of functions, to give you an idea of what you can achieve with it.

Increasing your online community, having more people following you on your social networks can be a good goal to start with your marketing strategy. Although it seems irrelevant to have more people in them, it is a good way to position yourself and to get more people to know you.

Increase your online reputation, with social networks you can improve your online presence, making creative presentations of your products. In addition, you have the advantage that you can see the results of the campaigns quickly to evaluate if a certain product is well received by the audience.

Loyal followers, an excellent way to use social networks to your advantage is to use them to build loyalty. You can make promotions or contests among your followers so that they agree to be on your customer list and you can send information directly to their email.

Learn to set goals

The reach that social networks have is impressive, but it won’t do you much good if you don’t have a well-designed campaign, starting with the goals. The goals must have certain characteristics for social media campaigns to be a success.

To begin with, the goals you set must have certain characteristics that indicate that they can be achieved, because setting ambiguous or unrealistic goals does not do much good in our strategy.

The most important thing in writing your goals is that they are:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Relevant
• Time-bound

A good example of a goal can be: “to use our Facebook Fan Page as our main channel for customer service in two months”, because it is specific, achievable and with a clear deadline.

2. Know your audience

In other posts we have explained the importance of knowing your audience, i.e. your future customers. For the formulation of social media strategies it is still very important to know what your customers like to see on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter or any other social network where you want to have a presence. At the end of the day knowing your followers will help you convert them into customers.

Basically, the data you are interested in from your audience are:

• Age
• Gender
• Location
• Average income
• Interests
• Occupation

To obtain this data, you can use the analytics of the social networks themselves, which will tell you the most general information about your followers. But don’t rely on these alone, because you can use Google Analytics to help you see which social networks appear in referral traffic or Keyhole.co to evaluate the best referral sites.

3. Know your competition

A great way to understand how a social network can work for your business is to review your competitors’ social networks.  Analyzing your competitor’s social media presence can give you a lot of information about what they are doing well and how you can replicate it, or what you can improve on their strategy.

4. Define which strategies you will use in each social network

If you are a user of more than one social network you will realize that each of them has a specific function and prioritizes one type of content over another. A very clear example of this is that networks like Instagram or TikTok prioritize multimedia content, so they are excellent channels to advertise a new product through its image, while on Twitter, although it also shares images and video, its priority is the texts, so it has become the customer service channel for many companies.

You must know about these differences between social networks and determine how you can use them to your advantage within your marketing strategy, because it is useless to put the same content and emphasis on all social networks, wasting the capabilities that each of them have.

5. Create a social media calendar

It’s no use having impressive and well thought out posts if you publish them out of time or before time; this is the most important reason to have a social media calendar.

A social media calendar will allow you to plan the perfect moments to post and, at the same time, it will help you to plan out better each publication. For example, you will have in mind key posts such as Christmas with enough time to design them.

6. Review your metrics

One of the most important advantages of social networks is that you can quickly have metrics that will help you evaluate the success and reach of your campaign. Some of these are very easy to review, as they are at hand at all times; we are referring to the likes and followers. This information, although accessible, is not very useful to measure the success of your campaign, so do not give it much value.

The best thing to do is to pay attention to other types of metrics that can help you evaluate your presence in networks: brand awareness and conversion.

Brand awareness

There are some platforms that help you track the mentions of your brand that are made on social networks, during a relevant time, especially useful at the time of launching a new product.

It is also important that you measure how many people see a post and at what times. To calculate this, you only have to multiply the number of your followers by 100. If you activate the “when my fans are online” function on Facebook you can find out the optimal time to make a post.

Other metrics to which you should pay important attention are those that help you measure the conversation rate you achieve with your social networks, i.e. the number of comments you get with your publications.

The importance of having this metric lies in the fact that it helps you understand which part of your audience makes its voice heard to provide feedback on your publications and what the meaning of these comments is. At the end of the day, a social media post, at the very least, has to seek to make conversation.

Conversion metrics

One of the most important statistics that you can access with your social networks are those that measure conversion, i.e. the number of visitors who click on one of your links to take action (which can be buying, subscribing or registering for a course or webinar). For this there are 3 statistics you have to check: conversion rate, click-through rate and bounce rate.

• The conversion rate measures precisely the number of followers who click on a link to make a purchase or subscribe, you can measure this with a URL shortener in the link of your publication and installing a cookie on the user’s machine.
• Click-through rate measures how often your visitors “click” on the call to action link in the post, tracking this allows you to determine how engaging your posts and calls to action are.
• The bounce rate measures the percentage of visitors who have clicked on the call to action link, but have only entered your web page for a few seconds, only to leave it quickly.

You can compare the bounce rate on your social networks with the bounce rate from other media, from Google Analitycs and with this you can check where the rate is lower, which means that you are reaching your target audience.

As you can see social networks are a very important part of any marketing strategy, so we hope that with this guide you can create accurate and effective strategies.

Tell us, do you know any other tips to optimize social media for your business?