Not every social media platform is right for every business and before you get started, let’s get back to basics, starting with the what, which and who:
What are your company’s goals for using social media?
Are you raising awareness, promoting your products and services, raising awareness of your culture, updates on projects, success stories, or engaging with stakeholders?
Which platforms are we going to prioritise?
Where is your audience/s and what platforms are your competitors using?
Who is going to take ownership?
Who in your company will take ownership for your social media strategy, or will this be a shared role? Are you going to offer any training to support them, this needs to seamless because mistakes on social media will affect your company’s reputation, and how will you review and evaluate their effectiveness, always testing and measuring success?
Complete a competitor analysis
A competitor analysis in social media marketing is an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of your current and potential competitors. Your analysis should be able to identify opportunities and threats. This doesn’t have to complicated, here’s our guide.
What is your content strategy?
Your content strategy should relate to the planning, development, and management of content, whether this is written, video or other. Consider the sources of your content, will your content come from reputable sources, will someone within your company write the content, such as blogs, commentary on latest industry news, case studies or success stories, or will it be outsourced?
Get the tools!
If you don’t have the right tools to help you manage your social media strategy, it will become all too overwhelming. There’s a never ending array of tools, here are some ideas and recommendations for you to try, depending on your budget.
Evaluate
Over time, you will get to understand, what topics your followers like, and the imagery working alongside. How many enquiries or call-to-actions (CTA’s) did you receive, or which posts had the most engagements? You can set your company’s own key metrics depending on what you deem suitable. However, it is important to start at the beginning, back to the basics.
Leave it to us!
We pride ourselves on getting to know our clients’ business’, their products, services and audiences, tailoring solutions to suit.
If you’d like advice or to talk through your current social marketing plan and how we can help, whether it’s a training requirement or outsourced solution, please contact us or give me a call on 0161 826 7181 or connect with me on LinkedIn to discuss ways my team and I can support your business. Alternatively, we have a whole host of complimentary fact sheets to help you on your own social media marketing journey, right here.
By Ann Davies, Director