Developing an Effective Social Media Strategy

Social Media has changed a lot since it first started gaining popularity as a Marketing Tool. Unfortunately, we can’t post a picture and hope for the best anymore. To truly reap the benefits of Social Media for your business, you need to have an effective strategy. In today’s blog post, we’re going to help you create an effective strategy to grow your business online using Social Media.Set realistic, measurable goals:It is vital that you set realistic goals for your Social Media platforms to help you develop a plan. However, it is also very important that you focus on the right goals and not get caught up with ‘Vanity Metrics’, such as the number of likes and followers you have. Instead, you should focus on valuable metrics that will benefit you and help achieve your objectives. Some important ones you should focus on are:Boosting Engagement: Adapt techniques that increase the amount of times followers engage with your content. This could be asking questions, doing a poll/quiz, or sharing an inspirational quote or story that your audience could relate to. Earlier we broke down the best ways to engage with your audience, check it out here.Building a community: Growing your followers is not a valid metric as they could be anybody, and may never have the intention of buying your products or services. You should aim to build a community around your brand. These are people who are interested in what you have to say and are potential customers. Reach out to your competitor’s followers to draw in an audience who are already interested in your type of products/services.Increase Brand Awareness: Social Media is one of the best ways to get noticed by potential customers. You can measure this by seeing how much reach your posts are getting via mentions, shares, retweets, etc.Increase Website Traffic: Another measurable metric is traffic coming from your social media platforms to your website. This is a great indicator as to whether your Social Media content is successful or not. You can measure your website traffic through Google analytics.Generate leads: A lead is basically someone who has given you some sort of personal information such as a name, email address, etc. You can use Social Media to generate these. This is highly measurable and can lead to an increase in returning customers and future sales.Know your audience inside and out:Knowing your audience is a huge part of developing your social media strategy. Without understanding who you are aiming your content towards, you will surely miss. Truly understanding your ideal audience, putting out content that resonates with them, and placing yourself on the right platformswill get you noticed quickly by the right people. You need to offer valuable content consistently across your Social Media platforms to not only be seen but also encourage customers to come back. Focus on being genuine and unique always!Set out a plan to achieve your goals:Goals should always be “S.M.A.R.T”: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timely.You need to set out exact figures and the dates you expect to achieve these by when creating a plan to achieve your goals.We recommend using the following metrics:Reach: This is the number of unique users who saw your posts. This is a great way to see how popular your content is and to see what works and what doesn’t.Engagement: Effectively engaging with your audience is key. Engagement is how many people liked, commented, saved, or shared your content. Aim to create content that is sharable and salvable as this tells the algorithms that your content is highly valuable.Hashtag Performance: What were your most used hashtags? What hashtags got you the most engagement? You can find these metrics in your post insights.Clickthrough Rate: How many people are following through on your call to action? What type of posts had the most click-throughs? Remember to place a call to action throughout your captions/description boxes. Don’t assume people know what to do, tell them!The above measures can be tracked via analytics for any of the major social media platforms. Then you can visually see what type of posts, platforms, and content work for your business. Focusing on these areas can help you set specific numerical targets to work towards.Create effective content:The most important thing to remember when creating any type of content is that it must bring value to your audience. You need to focus on the five main content pillars; Motivational, Relatable, Educational, Entertaining & Promotional. All of your content should come under these titles.Top Tip: For every promotional post you publish, you should share two other forms of content.If you struggle to create content, we have a blog post hereto help!Assessments:You should be continually assessing what is working, what isn’t, and how to keep improving. Continuously adapting is key to an effective Social Media Strategy. Ensure you change things when they aren’t working. Does an afternoon post get more engagement than a morning post? Is that inspirational quote you are posting once a week gaining you new leads? Do this every week to really determine what content your audience wants to see from you.Your strategy is going to be a lot of trial and error but monitoring it in real-time allows you to make small tweaks that will have a big benefit in the future. see hubwealthy.com/wealthy