Creating a Social Media Strategy

Before you ever start to dive into the extremely complicated world of social media, you need to make sure that you have a strategy so that your time is well spent and your effort is productive. An effective well thought out social media strategy will set you up for a clear action plan with goals and objectives that are in alignment with your business goals. You need to set up measurable goals, with clear tactics for your social media plan so that you can track your progress by analyzing your metrics.

Social Media Marketing Plan

As always with any marketing plan, you need to set up and identify who your audience is, this can include existing customers and new potential customers. Once you know who your audience is it will help you determine what social media channels that are right for your business. If you’ve already been running current social media profiles you can use this information by seeing which is receiving the most traffic. It may also be of benefit to have more than one social media profile on some networks, it all depends on how diverse your target market is.

Where To Start

A great place to start is looking at your competitor’s social media presence, see what the leaders in your industry you’re doing now and follow their lead. You don’t have to follow them word for word, but do understand what is working and what is not working, so that you can learn from their mistakes. They’ve already spent the money to determine what your audience is interested in and what social media platforms work the best. Once you’ve decided on brand messaging, you can now start to plan specific content. This can include campaigns around different product launches, events or services that you offer. Remember nobody wants to be overwhelmed with too much promotional content, make sure you are offering value to your current clients and potential clients, and that you have a balance between promotional and valuable content.

Create A Schedule

Developing a social media marketing strategy is a lot of work, but remember you don’t have to create all original content. Watching and sharing relevant content that fits your messaging will provide a great amount of value to your clients. This is called curated content, you should be keeping a log of this content that you can share on different networks, but make sure that you modify the content slightly. Finally, create a publishing schedule that will keep you on track with a mix of content across all your networks.

Some Good Social Media Platforms

Facebook – Wood Buffalo Design – Facebook is the world’s largest social platform with over a billion users worldwide. This is the perfect platform for getting a message out to everyone and their advertising targeting tools are the best in the business.

Twitter – Wood Buffalo Design – The great thing about Twitter is the ease of going viral with a message by properly using #hashtags. This platform has just under 400 million users and they just announced that they will be doubling the character limit to 280 words.

LinkedIn – Wood Buffalo Design – If you are in the B2B business world you need to be on LinkedIn, it is by far the most powerful social source for this market. (P.S.: Nobody is only in the B2B business model – Remember behind every business is people who make the decisions! We are all in the B2People business)

YouTube – Wood Buffalo Design  – YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, only Google is larger and Google owns YouTube. This platform is a great way to quickly be found on search engines and stand out from your competition by offering video promotional materials, Vlogs, and valuable content to your clients. Not only a great media platform but also a great SEO builder.

Wood Buffalo Design is an Edmonton SEO Agency