Social media strategy is essential to marketing. However, without a lot of experience of creating strategies for marketing on social sites or without the funds to employ a full time marketer, many businesses can come unstuck. In this article I’m going to share with you some of the questions that I use in my role as a professional social media strategist. You can use these questions to develop a social media strategy for your business in no time. Depending on the size of your business – some of these questions may not be applicable.
What are your business objectives? Define a specific niche, listen, learn their needs, and position your products and services to solve their problems as they see them. Then develop your videos, blog posts, and articles accordingly. See your objective not so much as “selling” to a “target market,” as helping your niche see how to meet their needs using your products and services. The material will need to appeal to the niche, (comma added) and offer them engaging and informative content.
How will you measure success? You may measure on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. A spreadsheet is an ideal (beginning) recording platform. Track the number of interactions, quality of interaction, time spent, number of responses and posts, etc. Also record the number of fans and followers that the campaigns are connecting. Take this from the number of blog visitors, Facebook fans and Twitter followers.
Who will develop content for your blog and other social media channels? Set up an approval process for the content before you make it publicly available. Follow the blog posts of your competitors and others serving your niche. Don’t plagiarize, but find ideas relevant to your business, and recycle them to suite your own niche. Blogs in the online marketing and social media arenas are often creme de la creme and well worth following.
Who will distribute the content across the web, (comma added) and share it with networks? Look for a staff member who might be particularly good at understanding where your niche is active on the Internet. One of the key tasks of marketing is not only to understand the needs of your niche but also where you might find them both online and offline. Avoid wasting your content by posting it to irrelevant sites.
How often will you post? This will depend on the resource or man hours available. Create an editorial or marketing calendar as a guideline for how many blog posts to make per month. Include other social media, posting to make the most of the time available.
A social media strategy is key to the success of social media marketing. If you answer these questions, you will gain more clarity and structure for the successful social media marketing of your business.