How To Successfully Advertise On Social Media – Creating your social media marketing strategy doesn’t have to be painful. Create an effective plan for your business in 9 easy steps.
A social media marketing strategy is a summary of everything you plan to do and hope to achieve on social media. It guides your actions and lets you know if you are succeeding or not.
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The more specific your plan is, the more effective it will be. Keep it concise. Don’t make it so tall and wide that it’s unreachable or impossible to measure.
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In this post, we’ll walk you through a nine-step plan to create your own winning social media strategy. We even have expert insights from Amanda Wood, Senior Manager of Social Marketing at Hootsuite.
Bonus: Get a free social media strategy template to quickly and easily plan your own strategy. Also use it to track results and present the plan to your boss, teammates, and clients.
Social media marketing is the practice of using social media channels to sell or promote a brand, product or service.
A social media strategy is a document that outlines your social media goals, the tactics you’ll use to achieve them, and the metrics you’ll track to measure your progress.
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Your social media marketing strategy should also list all of your existing and planned social media accounts along with specific goals for each platform you’re active on. These goals should align with your company’s broader digital marketing strategy.
Finally, a good social media plan should define roles and responsibilities within your team and outline the cadence of reports.
No time to read the whole article? Let Amanda, Hootsuite’s very own Senior Social Media Marketing Manager, walk you through our free social media marketing strategy template in under 10 minutes:
How to Create a Social Media Marketing Strategy in 9 Steps Step 1. Choose goals that align with business goals Set S.M.A.R.T. objectives
How To Develop A Social Media Strategy That Drives Brand Awareness & Roi
The first step to creating a winning social media strategy is to set clear goals and objectives. Without goals, you have no way to measure success and return on investment (ROI).
Vanity metrics like followers and likes are easy to track, but hard to prove their real value. Instead, focus on things like engagement, clicks, and conversion rates.
You might want to track different goals for different social networks or even different usage for each network.
For example, if you use LinkedIn to drive traffic to your website, you would measure clicks. If Instagram is for brand awareness, you can track Instagram story views. And if you advertise on Facebook, cost per click (CPC) is a common metric of success.
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Social media goals should align with your overall marketing goals. This makes it easier to show the value of your work and secure buy-in from your boss.
Start developing a successful social media marketing plan by writing down at least three social media goals.
“It’s easy to get overwhelmed deciding what to post and what metrics to track, but you need to focus on what you want to get out of social media to get started,” says Amanda Wood, senior manager of social marketing at Hootsuite. “Don’t start posting and tracking everything – match your goals to your business and your metrics to your goals.”
Get to know your fans, followers, and customers as real people with real wants and needs, and you’ll know how to target and engage them on social media.
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Social media analytics can also provide a lot of valuable information about who your followers are, where they live, and how they interact with your brand on social media. These insights allow you to refine your strategy and better target your audience.
Jugnoo, an Uber-like service for auto-rickshaws in India, used Facebook Analytics to learn that 90% of its referring users were between the ages of 18 and 34, and 65% of that group used Android. They used that information to target their ads, resulting in a 40% lower cost per referral.
Chances are your competitors are already using social media, and that means you can learn from what they’re doing.
A competitive analysis allows you to understand who the competition is and what they are doing well (and not so well). You’ll have a good idea of what’s expected in your industry, which will help you set your own social media goals.
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Perhaps one of your competitors is dominant on Facebook, for example, but has made little effort on Twitter or Instagram. You may want to focus on social media platforms where your audience is underserved, rather than trying to win over fans away from a dominant player.
Search for your competitor’s company name, account identifiers, and other relevant keywords on social media. Find out what they are sharing and what other people are saying about them. If they are using influencer marketing, how much engagement are those campaigns getting them?
As you track, you may notice changes in how your competitors and industry leaders are using social media. You can find new and interesting trends. You can even spot specific social content or a campaign that really hits, or totally bombs.
Just don’t go overboard with the spying tactics, Amanda advises. “Make sure you’re not ALWAYS comparing yourself to the competition – it can be a distraction. I’d say checking in monthly is healthy. Otherwise, focus on your own strategy and results.”
Social Media Strategy That Drives Your Brand’s Business Results
If you’re already using social media, take stock of your efforts so far. Ask yourself the following questions:
We’ve created an easy-to-follow guide and social media audit template to guide you through every step of this process.
Your audit should give you a clear picture of the purpose of each of your social accounts. If the purpose of an account isn’t clear, think about whether it’s worth keeping.
During the audit, you can discover fake accounts using your company name or product names.
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You may also want to verify your accounts to make sure your fans know they’re dealing with you.
When you decide which social networks to use, you’ll also need to define your strategy for each.
Benefit Cosmetics social media manager Angela Purcaro told eMarketer, “For our makeup tutorials…we’re all about Snapchat and Instagram Stories. Twitter, on the other hand, is designated for customer service.”
Hootsuite’s own social team even designates different purposes for formats within networks. On Instagram, for example, they use the feed to post high-quality educational infographics and product ads and stories to cover live events or quick social media updates.
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Pro Tip: Write a mission statement for each network. A one-sentence statement to keep you focused on a specific goal.
“We will use LinkedIn to promote and share our business culture to help with recruiting and employee advocacy.”
If you can’t create a strong mission statement for a particular social media channel, you might wonder if it’s worth it.
Note: While larger companies can and do address all platforms, small businesses may not be able to, and that’s okay. Prioritize the social platforms that have the biggest impact on your business and make sure your marketing team has the resources to manage content on those networks. If you need help focusing your efforts, check out our 18-minute social media plan.
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Once you’ve decided which networks to focus on, it’s time to create your profiles. Or improve existing ones to fit your strategy.
Pro Tip: Use high-quality images that follow the recommended dimensions for each network. Check out our always-updated social media image size cheat sheet for a quick reference.
Don’t let this list overwhelm you. Remember that it is better to use fewer channels well than to struggle trying to maintain a presence on all networks.
While it’s important to make your brand unique, you can still take inspiration from other businesses that are great at social media.
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“I consider it my job to stay active on social media — to know what’s trending, what campaigns are winning, what’s new on the platforms, who’s going above and beyond,” says Amanda. “This may be the funnest step for you, or the hardest, but it’s just as crucial as the rest of them.”
You can usually find them in the business section of the social network website. (Here’s the Facebook one, for example).
You can also check out The Facebook Awards or The Shorty Awards winners for examples of brands that are at the top of their social media game.
For learning and laughs, check out Fridge-Worthy, Hootsuite’s biweekly awards show that highlights brands doing smart and smart things on social media.
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Who do you like to follow on social media? What do they do that compels people to engage and share your content?
Then there is Shopify. The e-commerce brand uses Facebook to sell itself by showing customer stories and case studies.
And Lush Cosmetics is a great example of superior customer service on Twitter. They use their 280 characters to answer questions and solve problems in a very charming and on-brand way.
Hello beautiful! ? We are sorry to hear how much you miss Scrub Scrub Scrub. We’ll make sure our team knows you’d love to see it back on the shelves. In the meantime, check out Magic
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