Kill it with a social media plan
Social media is many things to many, many people. It is a way to keep in touch with friends near and far, current or past. It is a means to share photos, touching moments, thoughts and videos of people who fall. It’s also one of the most powerful weapons a business has in its marketing arsenal, and one that can reach far more target customers far more easily than any other marketing method.
Unfortunately, many businesses still employ a scattered and uncoordinated approach to their social media marketing, which means much of their ammunition is wasted. If you want to increase your visits, you need to aim for a real social media plan and set your sights on some tangible goals.
Which platforms best suit your audience?
Not all social media platforms are created equal, and the first step in making a plan is to decide which ones are likely to provide the greatest return on your time spent on them. Visual platforms like Pinterest or Instagram appeal to a different demographic than Facebook and Twitter, and it’s not uncommon to see a business succeed on one and relatively fail on another.
Identifying where your target audience hangs out online is crucial to finding them with your social networks.
Although your social media plan won’t need to include activity on all platforms, especially at first, you can still be careful to sign up for any that you might use in the future, just to make sure you take control before someone else. does.
Set goals for your social media plan
Once you’ve chosen your platforms and set up profiles, you need to define exactly what you want to achieve on them, and this means setting realistic, measurable, and achievable goals. These goals come in two flavors: interaction in your activity and the effect it’s having on your business in the real world.
While likes, comments, and shares are a decent indicator of whether someone is interested in your efforts, the real goal of your social media plan should be bigger than this; Growing your business is the real goal. Whether this means more traffic to a blog, more email addresses captured, or more physical sales made, you can only reach your goal if you’ve defined what it is.
what to post
Knowing what to post is the key to keeping your followers engaged and attracting new ones. Even on less visual platforms like Twitter, images work well, though there should always be a mix of post types. Successful social media campaigns may include images, quotes, related website links, videos, or exclusive company information and advertisements.
Social networks must also be social, and this means not being selfish. In addition to posting your own content, sharing other people’s content that you think your followers will benefit from is an integral part of a respected social media presence. It will mark you as an authority with your finger on the pulse of the entire industry, while also helping you network with those whose content you are sharing.
when to post
On certain platforms, the timing of your posts is everything. On Pinterest, people can search for specific posts regardless of when they were made. On Twitter, however, it’s all about the now, and people may not look back too much in their feed. This means that if they didn’t see your tweet at the time you sent it, they probably never will.
Because of this, it’s vital to post multiple times a day and then monitor the optimal times for your audience’s engagement.
Analyze and automate your social media plan
Once you’ve been posting long enough to have results you can analyze, analyze them. Find out which types of posts have seen the most engagement and which ones have led to the real-world goals you set, and focus on producing more of them.
Also check the patterns that indicate the best times for you to send your content and make sure you always post at these times.
With so many posts per day, no successful social media plan is ever fully implemented manually. By using services like Buffer or Hootsuite, you can automate and schedule your posts while using their analytics tools to check their performance.
Of course, any interaction you get on your posts needs to be responded to in a personal and human way, and automating your posts allows you time to do that every day.
A complete social media plan
Starting with deciding which platforms to use and progressing to automating all your posts, putting together a comprehensive social media plan could mean the difference between aimlessly posting posts into the ether or making them reach your target audience.