The social media strategy of a business refers to the actions and efforts taken by the business to market and promote its brand, products, or services through different social media platforms. Different social media sites are more suitable for promoting different products.
In building a social media strategy, a business needs to keep in mind the market it's looking to penetrate, and the characteristics of the audience it plans to target. For instance, a firm offering recruitment services may be more suited to do most of its social media marketing via LinkedIn, while another company selling arts and crafts items would like to promote them in Instagram stories.
Social media strategy planning also depends on the phase of business a company is in. For example, a startup firm that has limited marketing budget at hand would go for the organic forms of social media strategies, while a well-established business looking to enter new markets and offer product line extension can allocate some budget for paid advertising.
Whatever the case is, your social media strategy would enhance the overall marketing plan of your business. Hence, it is important for any entrepreneur to know how to create a social media strategy that brings in desirable results.
6 Ways a Social Media Strategy Benefits Your Business
Before we talk about the different social media strategies, let’s discuss 6 ways in which a social media content strategy can help your business to grow and become more successful.
1. It Gives Direction to Your Business
Without a proper marketing plan, a business has no direction to focus its marketing budget and efforts on. The marketing plan of a business these days cannot be complete without its social media strategy. When you promote your brand on social media, you are actually penetrating your customers’ smartphones - something that they keep in their hands or purses all the time and check every few minutes.
When you have a solid social media content strategy in place, you know exactly what to promote, how to promote, and where to promote. Most businesses are familiar with all the popular social media sites and choose the ones they want to use for their marketing accordingly.
Having a social media strategy for your business actually gives a direction to your social profiles as well. For instance, if you are running a business and need to market it, you wouldn’t just create a Facebook page because it’s a trend among the youth. Now you will prepare a Facebook page with the purpose of promoting your products. Your profile pictures, social media content, contact details, everything will be tailored to attract customers to your business.
2. It Makes it Easier to Measure and Improve Your Marketing Efforts
When you promote your products on social media as part of your social media strategy, you get access to social media statistics as well. If you are running a Facebook Group, for instance, you can check the reach for each post you make in the group. When you make posts on a Facebook Page or Facebook Group, you can also see how many people ‘like’ it or post a comment on it.
The comments users make on Facebook or Instagram feed can also help you figure out how your customers feel about your brand. Customers usually give honest feedback on social media, because they know their peers and friends they are connected with on social media would rely on their opinion about the brand.
Therefore, when you create a social media strategy, you get to track the results of your marketing efforts through your social media statistics, along with your website analytics or any other marketing data that you have. This enables you to respond to your customers’ feedback more promptly and effectively.
3. It Enhances Your Marketing Efficiency
Building a social media strategy involves pre-planning your marketing content. You might feel like this actually takes more of your time, but in the long run, it proves to be a time-saver. When you have a clear direction and your inbound marketing goals are aligned, the efficiency of your efforts increases. Pre-planning your social media content strategy helps you focus on exactly what you need to do, which reduces the time you will spend on actions that don’t matter to your business.
A well-thought social media strategy also makes it easier for you to keep track of your time. When you know you have to make a certain post at a certain time, you would have to monitor the clock all the time. You would need to set aside some time slots and stick to them. Enhanced efficiency reduces the stress that comes with running your business operations.
4. It Keeps You Active
A social media strategy keeps you on your toes. It differs from direct marketing or any other form of marketing that requires effort on your part at designated times of the day. Social media runs round the clock, and for implementing social media strategies in the right sense, you need to work on them round the clock.
If you don’t work on your social media strategy persistently, you won’t be able to gain new followers. You might even drive your existing followers away. Building a social media strategy includes scheduling your social media posts. You need to know what and when to post, and cannot starve the audience of your content.
5. It Enables Better and Bigger Campaigns
Businesses know well that a good social media strategy can trigger greater engagement of your audience with your brand. The amount of engagement you can get on your Twitter chats or Facebook posts is a lot more than what you can by building any other online community for your brand. For example, in Strikingly, we have our online community as a knowledge-based help center. But we also promote ourselves on social media sites.
Image taken from Strikingly
When you have the minor stuff covered, you can have more time to focus on bigger marketing campaigns to run on the other marketing media. Cross-selling becomes easier and more workable, giving you opportunities to increase your sales revenue.
6. It Prepares You for Anything
This might sound strange, but it’s true that social media strategy keeps you on your toes to receive any kind of response from your customers. Since customers are the most frank in giving their opinions on social media, you might get some shocking comments coming in too.
An interesting part about implementing social media strategies is that the feedback that your customers post publicly cannot be erased. For example, when a user rates your Facebook page, there is no way for you to remove that rating. If a customer is not satisfied with your products or services, they can easily browse onto your Facebook page and write a negative review that you can remove. It will be available for anyone to read. Therefore, it is important to deal with customers on social media with empathy.
5 Effective Social Media Strategies for Your Business
Here are 5 different ways to build and implement a winning social media strategy for your business.
1. Integrate Your Social Media Pages With Your Website
Integrating your social media pages with your brand website helps you drive traffic and social media followers to your website. Since your website is the main platform for showcasing your products and services, getting more traffic to it would directly or indirectly increase your sales. When users visit your website after reading about your brand on social media, they are more likely to take desirable actions on the site. This can increase your site’s conversion rate. It is, therefore, a good idea to insert social media icons on the footer of your website as part of your social media strategy.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
2. Include More Video Marketing in Your Social Media Content Strategy
Videos attract a longer attention span compared to blog articles. If your social media strategy involves a lot of video marketing, it is going to attract more traction towards your business.
3. Select Your Social Media Platforms Carefully
Make sure you don’t promote your brand on social media platforms that are irrelevant to your business, or else you would waste your time and effort and not getting any results.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
4. Make Use of Influencers on Social Media
An effective way to create a social media strategy is to make use of influencers with a good following on social media. We call this influencer marketing. Influencers are people who are trusted by your target audience and can go a long way in influencing the buying decisions of their followers.
5. Allow Social Login on Your Website and App
Allowing your users to log in to your website, app, or online store via their social media account makes it very convenient for them to sign up with you. If you can build this feature into your website as part of your social media strategy, you can grow your subscribers and members list faster.
If you want to have a website that allows you to implement your social media strategy successfully, consider building your site in Strikingly.
Image taken from Strikingly
Strikingly is a website builder that enables you to create a full-fledged website on your own. You don’t need any coding or programming skills for using Strikingly. We provide you complete support in case you face any technical issues and guide you until your website is up and running, and is aligned with your social media strategy.
We have hundreds of satisfied users who started their business by building a website with us. To begin, all you need to do is sign up for your free Strikingly account, and select a suitable website template. Once you get access to your Strikingly editor, you can insert your website content using our easy-to-use drag-and-drop feature.
