How to Build a Social Strategy
Your social media strategy should be the guiding light for all social activity your brand undertakes for the year. It is here you should be setting out your social objectives, plans, and tactics, as well as mapping out your target audiences, your social style guide and tone of voice, your hashtag strategy and your KPIs.
Let’s break that down a little further:
Objectives
To really make the most of social (and to maximise your time or the time your paying someone else to take), it’s really important to know why you’re on social and what role you want it to play. Gone are the days where you could get away with saying “we just want a presence”.
Plans
What campaigns are you running this year? Do you have NPD that’s being released? Events your attending? Key marketing occasions and promotions? Map out your wider marketing plans and work out how social will contribute to their success.
Tactics
Choose your channels.
Who are you targetting and which channels are they on?
How will you use each channel and what for?
Decide on a content mix and ensure it’s going to work well with the algorithms.
Work out if you want to engage influencers and content creators
How often will you post?
How will you manage customer feedback and enquiries?
What tricks will you employ to maximise reach and engagements?
Audiences
When it comes to your target customer, you should know their ages, where they live, their income level, interests, buying habits etc. The more you know, the more effective your social strategy is going to be, particularly when it comes to paid social. Build a consumer persona and keep them in mind as you build your plans. You need to make sure the strategy you set is going to find them and ultimately convert them. It’s also a good idea to consider new audiences you might want to recruit that sit outside of your core demographic.
Style Guide
How will your brand identity translate on social? Many brands are limited by a simple colour palette, logo and a couple of fonts, which may not be enough to create a strong social identity. Working with creatives to develop an extension of your core branding that will resonate on social is key, and sticking to it will give you consistency and brand recognition.
Tone of Voice
Language is important and anyone who is working on your channels needs to live and breathe your brand’s tone of voice. This is the way to develop personality on channel and maintain authenticity. Don’t be swayed by too many trends and stay true to who you are - there is such a thing as the wrong emoji…
Hashtag Strategy
Making your content more discoverable is a no brainer. Find relevant hashtags that are popular with users and create your own hashtags to group conversations and tags. Strike a balance between general, niche and branded hashtags and always ensure your content is relevant!
KPIs
KPIs should easily fall out of your objectives but be clear on them. Write them down, share them with your colleagues, and go after them with laser focus. Whether it’s web traffic, purchases, saves, pins, shares, watches, reach… the numbers only matter if you know how to read them so do your homework.
If you are in need of a social strategy to help your business grow and need some help to build it, book a discovery call with Ann by emailing ann@theseedgroup.co.uk.