Developing a Successful Social Media Strategy

Developing a Successful Social Media Strategy

Being a social media marketer is not about getting likes to your Facebook page or attracting followers to your Twitter account, or even creating your community on Google +, its way deeper than that. It requires special skills and techniques that helps you become successful in what you do.

social-media-strategyBut before digging in into the strategies you need to follow to be successful, you have to set your goals and objectives. What do you want to achieve from social media? Is it branding? Qualifying clients? Building Database? Or maybe getting traffic to your blog? etc. There is a lot you can achieve from social media but in order to do so, you will have to follow certain social media strategies.

Creating a social media strategy begins with defining your buyers’ personas. According to Hubspot, A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers. When creating your buyer persona(s), consider including customer demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, and goals. The more detailed you are, the better. The more you know your buying personas, the more you are able to deliver the right content at the right time through the right social media channels.

Once you define your buyers’ personas, it will be easy then to evaluate the quality of your content and its relevancy to your buyers’ persona. Always respect your audience’s time and don’t deliver irrelevant content that might not be of interest to him/her.

Once you have your content ready, determine where your audience are most active in and what type of content you are sending out to each channel. Make sure to customize your monotone when shifting from one social channel to another especially when sharing content on Facebook and LinkedIn.

Now that you have the content shared on different platforms, you need to listen to your audience and respond to their interactions and requests in a very professional and etiquette manner. This is not a radio or television that creates a monologue communication stream, this is social media, the dialogue communication media.

Doing that will take one step closer to start building your successful social media strategy. You also need to take into consideration the following questions:

Do you have an optimised profile?

An optimised social profile gives your audience the first impression of your professionalism. That does not mean that you have to wear a tie when going social but at least you have to look smart, creative, confident, and available anytime. Work on your visuals to have them appealing for your audience to continue reading. Think of it like your house, it shows like you care, you have pride and you have something to show.

Don’t miss out any opportunity, an optimised profile can be a strong aspect for developing your strong social media strategy. Always have a complete bio of your business or what you want yourself to appear in front of your audience. Include relevant search keywords that help you get found on search engines, and of course never miss out to include your website links to make it easy for visitors to find your site.

Are you reaching out to your fans/followers?

Reach is an important factor that determines how successful your social media marketing campaign is. When building you reach, don’t just search for your followers or your fans, dig deeper to reach your followers’ followers and their fan base. That way you will guarantee that your message is reaching out to a deeper audience base. But this will not happen if your fans do not engage with you. And in order to get them do so, you need to share your valuable content and be interactive with them. Fans follow your page or your twitter account because they expect to receive something valuable from you. If you don’t fulfill their expectations, you will end up having dead followers and eventually having a drawdown in your fan base. Always share valuable content with them, listen and respond to them, interact with them, and on top of that, always be up to their expectations.

Once you start connecting with your people, you want to use the cocktail party rule. Treat your social media interaction as you are in a cocktail party. Don’t be the jerk that no one wants to talk to, you want to be the life of the party. How do we do that? This is done by applying the rules of a successful social media etiquettes.