4 steps to building a better social media strategy

Most businesses nowadays—even, or perhaps especially, the very smallest—know that social media is important. However, the gap between awareness and success can be a chasm. Here are the main places where a social media strategy can fail:

  1. Lack of a clear marketing strategy beyond content sharing
  2. Dependence on promotional-heavy content
  3. Non-existent customer/user engagement

While most social media platforms have been around for years, the evolution of marketing strategies in relation to the digital age has been more slow-paced, particularly in the small to midsized business market. Even today, nearly 24% of small businesses have never used social media and, of those actively using digital marketing, over 90% state that a company Facebook page is their primary (or in some cases only) platform.1 Unfortunately, most SMBs aren’t harnessing the full power of effective analytics or developing clearly-defined marketing strategies. Below we’ve collected some key tenets of an effective social media strategy.

4 steps to building a better social media strategy

Emphasize social listening

When thinking about digital marketing, it’s tempting to translate old school ways of advertising into digital counterparts—print ads become Facebook posts and newsletters become blogs. However, previous means of advertising were limited in that they couldn’t be very well-evaluated other than through direct business outcomes. Social media has changed that by allowing companies to weigh the effectiveness of their promotional materials and assess their customers’ needs like never before. Social listening (i.e. keeping track of key words, products, and themes associated with your brand across different sites) allows for a much more thorough collection of data about both the marketplace and customers—which bring us to our next point.

Boost customer service

Platforms like Hootsuite, Buffer, and Sprout Social allow businesses to manage and monitor a multitude of social media accounts and keep up to date with current trending topics. By using effective social media management tools, companies are able to monitor and engage with every customer inquiry, concern, mention, anecdote, review, and passive aggressive complaint quickly and personally. Moreover such tools can also be used to evaluate the success of particular products and campaigns. This is how brands like Herschel Supply Co. were able to achieve a 20% lift in customer service satisfaction rate and 60% increase in overall positive brand sentiment.2

Promote valuable content

This one may seem simple but it’s more scientific than you might think. Advertising has always been about making people forget they are being sold something and the quickest way to shatter that illusion is to spam your followers and potential customers with a flood of content that reads as pure self-promotion. Using the ‘Rule of Thirds’ your content should be evenly split between content that’s A) about or by you and focused on your business B) curated from others and focused on your market and C) personal interactions that build your brand.3

Unite and conquer

Having dedicated resources for social media is important. However, even the best resources won’t take you very far if the strategy hasn’t been well-defined or well-communicated. Whether your goal is increasing SEO, improving customer service, or widening your scope, speaking from a unified, cohesive voice is vital. Take CA Technologies as an example—they created SocialU as a program to train all employees in the use of social media both internally and externally. In doing so, they created a workforce that was both incredibly knowledgeable of modern marketing tactics and highly-aware of company policy and overall strategy.4 Ultimately, the program resulted in an extremely effective marketing and brand advocacy campaign.

By now, most business owners know that if you don’t exist online, you don’t really exist. More importantly, if you don’t show up on the first page of a web search, you really don’t have a presence at all. When wielded properly, organized social media marketing can be one of the greatest assets to an SMB—allowing for direct customer engagement, increased brand awareness, effective data collection, increased audience, and more cost-effective advertising.

References

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