Defining your social media strategy

A well thought out social media strategy is the cornerstone to any great social media campaign. This would typically consist of your social media goals, the ways in which you plan to achieve them and the metrics you will track to measure your progress.

You first need to define the key goals for your social media strategy. Factors such as the size of the business and your audience or industry type have an impact when deciding the social media strategy and objectives. For example, do you want to prioritise engagement on a post over follower count, or click-through rate above conversion rate? For example, a smaller, newer business may initially prioritise increasing follower count over increasing online sales as their business objective is to first raise awareness of their business to a wider audience.

Exploring your target audience and thinking about their likes, dislikes and what sort of content they would prefer will help you determine the right social media platforms to use. Different platforms cater to different target audiences. For example, LinkedIn is seen to be the platform for professional networking. The content tends to be longer form, more formal in tone, and business-related which skews towards a more professional audience. In comparison TikTok, a relatively new social media platform, is more vibrant and playful. Its medium is exclusively shorter form video content and its audience tend to be more youthful than on LinkedIn.

It’s important to have engaging content that appeals to your target audience, and the different content types available on each social media platform can help you vary your content. For example, Twitter and LinkedIn are great for written content such as blog posts or articles, whereas Instagram and TikTok focus heavily on visual content types like images and videos. Tools such as content calendars and social media management tools can help you plan when and where to publish content and help you keep track of your campaign.

Lastly, measuring the success of your social media programme is important as it shows you how successful a campaign is and if it is achieving the objectives it set out to. We will talk about how to measure the success of your social media campaign later in this section!

Look at the infographic below which shows you how you can build out your social media strategy!

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