 If you want to make an impact with your audience on social media, it takes time. You need to be there every day posting content, interacting, and building your audience. This time drain is one of the major challenges, but there’s an easy way to overcome it – Create a detailed social media strategic plan. What Is a Social Media Strategy? A social media strategy is a blueprint or roadmap that tells you the what, when, who, and where of everything you do on social media. It is a summary that links your social media activity to your overall business goals. It explains what you will do when there and how you’ll measure your performance and make improvements as necessary. Simply creating a profile and posting randomly whenever you feel like it isn’t enough to get results, even if you do it daily. You need a solid plan if you want to use social media to achieve your business goals. How Your Social Media Strategy Saves You Time How do you create your social media strategic plan? It starts with some research to gain an understanding of your target market. You then need to create your plan and set goals. While it takes some time to do this crucial planning, it will save you time in the long run. Your strategy saves you time because it stops you from spinning your wheels. It’s remarkably easy to waste time on sites like Facebook, scrolling endlessly through your feed, liking this, sharing that. But one part of your plan is an organized to-do list so that each day when you get started, you know exactly what you need to do. More Results for Your Efforts You’ll also save time because everything you do on social media will have an impact on your bottom line. This is because when you made your plan, you identified goals and how you’ll reach them. All your activity on these sites is connected to reaching those goals. Tips on Saving Time on Social Media In addition to implementing a strategic plan, here are some other ways you can make the most of your time on social media. Create a Schedule. Find out when your audience is most responsive and use this time for posting and interacting. Decide how often you’ll post and create an editorial calendar. You’ll do this as part of creating your plan. Start Collecting Ideas. You’ll need a great deal of content, so create an ideas list and add to it whenever you’re struck by inspiration. You can refer to this list when it’s time to write and you won’t get stuck with writer’s block. Automate Where You Can. Take advantage of automation tools for tasks that don’t need the personal touch. You can do this with software or a social media dashboard. Repurpose Content. Look for evergreen content you can repurpose. Another great content shortcut is to curate content so you don’t need to create it all yourself. Start Creating Your Social Media Strategy Now Even if you’re there every day interacting with your audience, put the brakes on now and take some time to create your strategic plan. Your content will resonate even better with your audience and you’ll start building real relationships. Take FREE "Create Your Social Media Master Plan" online course to get started today! Enroll HERE Pat Simes is a Business Strategist, blogger and Founder of Innovative Business Solutions and Innovate Academy. She currently resides in the Midwest and is committed to inspiring and empowering entrepreneurs to transform their vision to reality. 
0 Comments
 How do you get results toward your business goals with social media? If you set aside some time each day for building your audience, sharing helpful content, and interacting to drive engagement, this will help. But you won’t truly see results unless you create a clear social media strategy. Your social media strategy is your plan for using sites like Facebook and Twitter to achieve your business goals. It’s a plan that maps out how you’ll use these sites in the coming months in order to sell, grow brand awareness, and build strong relationships with your market. Here are the ways your strategy will help. Focus for Your Social Media Activity Without a social media strategy in place, the time you spend on these sites might be time wasted. You could end up just endlessly scrolling through your feed and commenting randomly, not really getting anything at all done. Your strategy gives your activity here focus. You’ll have specific tasks to carry out each day, all of which will get you closer to the goals you’re trying to achieve. It’ll be time well spent that will achieve results. High-Value Content Your Audience Will Love Your social media strategy will greatly improve the content you post and share. This is because part of creating your plan is to research your audience and figure out what topics, formats, and types of content they prefer. You’ll know what problems they face so you can offer the right kind of help. You’ll create a detailed calendar that ensures you’re sharing the right material. The result is that your content will resonate with your audience and engage them, and you’ll see more engagement. Take the Work out of Social Media Social media works best when you’re relaxed and having fun, interacting with your audience in a natural way. When you create a plan beforehand where you know what content to share when and you have protocols for social media engagement, you can simply plug and play. You won’t have to sit down each day and figure out what needs to be done next. You’ll have a clear and prioritized to-do list. Get Closer to Your Business Goals The first step in creating a social media strategy is to identify your business goals and how social media fits into them. These goals are the basis for everything you’ll do there, from posting schedule to choosing content types; from the tone you use to interact with followers to the metrics you’ll use to decide whether you’re making progress toward these goals. Your social media engagement will be more effective. Get Started with Your Social Media Strategy How do you get started creating an effective social media strategy? It starts with understanding the value of your offering and the needs of your target market. You’ll then create a plan and implement, monitoring metrics to see what is getting results and what isn’t so you can refine. Want to learn more about how you can create a "Social Media Master Plan"? Head over HERE to register Pat Simes is a Business Strategist, blogger and Founder of Innovative Business Solutions and Innovate Academy. She currently resides in the Midwest and is committed to inspiring and empowering entrepreneurs to transform their vision to reality.  Your social media strategy is a summary of everything you’ll do on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter in order to achieve your business goals. Without a strategy in place, you’ll spend time every day on social media but see little concrete results in what you do. The plan needs to be in place so that everything you do makes an impact. So, how do you create a blueprint for social media success? Here are the steps you need to take. Start with Your Business Goals The whole point of creating this blueprint is to align with your overall business goals so that your social media activity helps you achieve them. For example, if your overall goal is to bring leads to their first purchase, you might want to spend your time on social media solving problems and getting to know people on a one-on-one basis. They come to see you as an expert in your niche area and then they’ll go to your ecommerce store when they want to buy. Start by clarifying your goals and then identify exactly how your social media activity is going to help. Decide on the Tactics You’ll Use You create a social media strategy by starting with the end (your goals) and working your way backward. Once you’ve identified your goals, it’s time to choose tactics you’ll use for your daily social media activity. You can think of tactics as your daily to-do list. Tactics include things like joining or starting a group, conducting polls, creating challenges, making videos, and so on. Monitor with Metrics Your blueprint will include metrics you’ll use to track your performance. For example, they might show how many new followers you have, how much engagement, or how many conversations from social media. You have a wealth of choices in what to track, so consider your goal and which metrics specifically will show whether you’re getting there or not. You’ll then use this data to make improvements in your strategy. Assign Roles and Responsibilities When implementing your social media strategy, you can’t do everything yourself. You’ll need to assign roles and responsibilities. Decide who will do what and give them the tools and training they need to do it. This should be outlined in your social media strategy. Here is also where you might consider automation and outsourcing. There is a great deal of help available in software tools and virtual help. Just make sure you are doing all the tasks that need the personal touch yourself. Ready to Get Started on Your Strategy? It takes a bit of time and planning to put together your social media strategy, but this is time well spent. Once you have it in place, you’ll be ready every day with a list of focused tasks on social media that will get you results. Want to learn more? Take The Free Course HERE! Pat Simes is a Business Strategist, blogger and Founder of Innovative Business Solutions and Innovate Academy. She currently resides in the Midwest and is committed to inspiring and empowering entrepreneurs to transform their vision to reality.   One of the key foundations of your social media strategy is a detailed customer profile that describes your target audience as an individual. To create this, you’ll research your audience members and use objective data and feedback, not just assumptions. Here is what you’ll learn about your followers on social media and how this information will help you succeed. Demographics - Who Your Audience Is The first thing you learn is your audience’s demographics. This data answers the question, “Who are they.” It includes information like: - Age - Geographical location - Language - Gender - Marital status - Education level - Income level Include whatever other information you feel might be relevant as well. Most of this data can be obtained by looking at social media profiles. Psychographics – Your Audience’s Beliefs and Lifestyle Psychographic data is not about who your audience are, but how they think and behave. This field seeks to discover the cognitive processes that influence behavior. This is essential for any business as it determines the person’s buying behavior. Psychographics include: - Core values - Attitudes toward brands and products - Likes and preferences - Behavior, especially in regard to businesses they interact with - Hobbies and leisure time activities You need to dig a bit deeper to reveal this information. You might follow your audience on social media or carry out focus groups. It’s a little tougher to gain this kind of data so pay close attention to your customers’ conversations. Pain Points – The Challenges Your Audience Faces An important part of your psychographic data is your customer’s pain points. These are the challenges they face, the issues they need to overcome, or the questions burning inside them. If you can offer a solution these problems through your content, you’ll build a strong relationship with them. The best way to discover this information is to follow your audience members online. See what they post about or ask about on social media. Look at the conversations they have in online groups or comments. Your Audience’s Social Media Preferences By following your audience on social media, you can also learn about their preferences. You need to know what type of content they like so you can use that to engage with them. Preferences include not just topics they’re interested in, but formats they like (video or text), social media channels they use, and other social media behavior. Best Practices for Social Media Engagement You’ll really learn a great deal once you implement your social media strategy and get results. As you implement, you’ll monitor analytics to discover what works and what doesn’t. Every industry, every niche, every audience, and every business has its own best practices. The only way to master yours is to launch your social media strategy and put your plan into action. Get The Free Course. Register HERE Pat Simes is a Business Strategist, blogger and Founder of Innovative Business Solutions and Innovate Academy. She currently resides in the Midwest and is committed to inspiring and empowering entrepreneurs to transform their vision to reality.  |
AuthorPat Simes Archives
September 2024
Categories
All
|
RSS Feed