When making a social media plan, create one with clear goals and measurable objectives to increase brand awareness and increase sales. More importantly, use your social media marketing plan to focus future social media posts on delivering highly engaging, value-based content that will boost your social share of voice among competitors.
Increasing your social share of voice will help you to reach your target audience with key messages that can bring members of your target audience closer to becoming clients, customers, or donors. Above all, use a robust social media plan to obtain a strategic business advantage.
Starting Your Plan
Start your social media marketing plan off with your company background. Do you know your company well enough to explain its role and purpose in a succinct paragraph? What industry are you in and how big is your industry’s landscape? If you are not clear about your business, no one else will be, and that level of weakness will show through in your social media communications.
Setting Benchmarks
Next, what are your numbers looking like? How many people follow your company on each of the social media channels you’re on? Is there room to grow these numbers? (Of, course there is!) Increasing social media followers and touch points per customer can boost brand awareness and company profits, but it starts with setting quantitative benchmarks and tracking against them.
What’s Your Competition Up To?
Do some research on three, maybe four, companies you consider your competition. How many people are following them? What channels are they using and do you see a definitive trend? What type of information are they sharing with their followers?
Maybe your competitors are sharing expert insights, subject-specific thought leadership, or jokes. See what is working for those in your industry to garner followers and see where you can draw points of parity and points of difference.
Use sites like Fanpage Karma to compare your company’s profile or Page Performance Index score, which measures engagement and fan growth on Twitter or Facebook, against competitors, as it could be possible that your brand isn’t posting enough times a day.
Talk To Who You Want
To reach more people, determine the audience you want to attract to your company. I know, we want everyone to like us, but a gunshot approach to social media marketing is just not great. Think of your ideal customers and create content for them. Ask yourself, which ethnicities, how old, how much money, and what goals and inspirations do the people you want to do business with have?
More importantly, what are your followers’ social media habits? For example, if you have a business focused helping people to invest, where’s your target market more likely to go online to learn about information on investing?
Communicating with the Customer
After you determine who you want to talk to on social media, win over followers and increase your chances of turning them into customers by being ready and willing to communicate with them most of the day, and in a few different ways, to develop an emotional connection between the brand and the customer.
Communication with consumers should be a move toward the re-contextualization of pleasure and esteem-boosting for the consumer. One great way to do this would be with branded content storytelling that encourages a call-to-action while being relevant, emotive, and timely.
Setting Clear Social Media Marketing Objectives
Most of us are looking to increase sales. Determine the timeframe of the goals you want to achieve and put a stat to it.
Do you want to increase sales by 10 percent by next year? Want to achieve 30 percent brand awareness among your target audience? Do you want to generate an additional 20 leads per month? Want to increase your company’s social media share of voice among competitors by 5% by May? Figure it out and stick to it.
So, if your ultimate goal is to drive sales, make sure your objectives align with your sales funnel and drives consideration and retention from social awareness.
Social Media Monitoring Schedule
Great social media metrics to track include a share of voice, sentiment, brand awareness via the count of followers, likes, mentions, retweets, influencer activity, and referrals on a monthly basis. Ideally, social media link activity should be examined weekly with a comprehensive report delivering a snapshot overview of all key metrics.
Social Media Channel Selection
There are so many to choose from, but here are a few things to know. Facebook prevails as “the market leader for social networking” and is more of a relationship-driven social media channel. Moreover, over 70 percent of Facebook users maintain a household income of $75,000 or more.
Also, something to consider, Twitter is said to be the “lifeblood of social media engagement” for businesses. Twitter has also grown in popularity as one of the best options for social customer service. Additionally, about 30 percent of Twitter users make over $75,000 annually.
To touch upon three social media channels, let’s talk about LinkedIn. LinkedIn is the top social media channel for chief executive officers (CEOs) and other affluent individuals. LinkedIn is the top social referral source, accounting for 64% of all visits from social media platforms to business websites.
Creating an Editorial Calendar
Changes to current social media marketing also involve developing an editorial calendar. Don’t overwhelm yourself too much and try to create a yearlong calendar. Decide what you want to post ahead of time on a weekly or monthly basis. In addition consider relevant holidays, official and fun.
Creating social media posts connected to observances are great ways to align your brand with new audiences and generate stronger social media engagement. Definitely look at CoSchedule’s compilation of 16 studies on the best time to post on all social media channels.
In Conclusion
The implementation of a social media plan will undoubtedly achieve your company’s overall goal of increasing new qualified leads. Moreover, if desired, this will give you an opportunity to re-position your brand with a new social media strategy. Improving its performance on social media by engaging more followers, creating a story, and tapping into what matters to current and potential clients.
However, to track progress, a social media tool to measure and monitor social media outreach should be used. Social media tools will allow for social media listening and benchmarking. From social media listening, insights, and recommendations, best practices can be created.
Guided by quantitative and qualitative analytics, data will also support improvements to specific aspects of your social media plan, as well as help to refine the social media editorial calendar to be filled with content followers feel worth passing along to others.
Moreover, with the understanding that some aspects of the plan may need refinement, keen attention to trends on each social media channel will be critical to helping you to meet or exceed established business and marketing goals.
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