Fantastic question no one who asked me!

The short of it, is that a Social Media Strategy is a plan for you to:

• Achieve your business goals by utilising social media platforms

The long of it? Well… pop the kettle on because I would like a cuppa for this, and get yourself one too.

I’m going to explain WHAT a social media strategy is, by explaining HOW to make one. First of all..

What do you want social media to do for your business?

• Do you want your audience to buy your product through social platforms?
• Do you want to build awareness of your brand with this audience?
• Do you want them to engage and interact with your content?
• Are you looking for email sign ups with this audience?

…And how are you going to measure these goals?

• Link clicks
• Impressions/Reach
• Likes/Comments/Shares
• Video Views
• Website visits
• Etc.

What do you REALLY want to get out of social media to benefit your business?

It’s best to pick one or two core goals for your social strategy at this point, in order to simplify the planning and measuring process. (Just in the beginning, everything can be tailored over time to ensure your business goals are being met and adapting to seasons/campaigns etc.)

Once you have your goal in mind, start with your audience

Where does your target audience live online? And what do they use social media for?

The first thing you need to do when putting together a social media strategy is honing in on your channels, generally, the popular opinion is that a company should be on all social platforms – but this is simply not the case.

And if you do insist on being on every channel, then it’s important to adapt your content to the niche of that channel – but we can get to the nitty gritty of channels in another blog post.

If you already have social channels set up, please audit them with fresh eyes – it’s often the little things that are overlooked.

…Back to your audience

You can use websites such as GWI, or simply – Google, to find out the most popular social platform for your audience as well as their social media habits.

What you need to do now, is research your audience – and I don’t just mean demographics. I mean you’ve looked into them so much that you can essentially create a persona of them. You want to know their likes, dislikes, their favourite brands, their least favourite brands, content they normally interact with, why they are even on social media (what do they use it for?) their passions, their values and even how they like their coffee in the morning. (Kidding, but not really if you are a coffee shop).

…and that’s where someone like me becomes useful to help with this kind of research ;)…

Anyway… enough of the self promotion…

Once you have your:

• Goal(s)
• Audience(s)
• Platform(s)

All worked out, it’s time to research your competitors, to find out:

• What they are doing right
• What they are doing wrong

What’s important to note here, is that regardless if your competitors are doing well with your audience – this does not give you the right to copy them. They have worked hard on their own strategy, and so take the learning, and work out how you can apply this to your own unique strategy.

Don’t just look at their content

Also look at their copy, hashtags, how often they post, what channels they are on, what their community management is like… and so on. You’ll be looking at your competitors channels so much you’ll probably end up being served their ads, and you will no longer be able to escape from them.

But maybe that’s a good thing! Everything is there for you to learn from.

Alright, I THINK, I THINK, you are now ready…

Hopefully, you have collated all of the above into your beautiful shiny new social strategy, and now onto your content/creative strategy, and media strategy… but I’ll let you finish your tea before I start gibbering on about that.