How to plan social media marketing?

💡 Social Media Plan

In the previous post we have talked about why social media is effective for business. Now if you have chosen the channels you want to use, it’s time to start making some plans to promote yourself.

👉 What to consider to get it started?

What you want to post.
When you want to post it.
Where it makes sense to post.
Who at your business should be posting.

👉 So, what is a Social Media Plan?

Consider the next 6 to 12 months, and start creating a calendar.
Draft out details like what topics it makes sense for you to post about?
What’s your audience interested in?
When does it make sense to post about those topics?

🚩 TIPS: Don’t forget to keep on checking

What: Keep updated to latest trends and topics.
When: Major Events or Holiday.
Where: Which Social Media Channel
Why: Check Business Goals. You use Social media to raise awareness for or deepen relationships with your existing fans and customers?

🤓 Keep in mind

Managing social media is a full time job. Yes, you can do it by yourself when you first start. But when your role needs to focus on business strategy and operation more, that would be better to hire someone who can take that task and let both of you focus on the fields you guys are good at and have the best performances.

The ideal role would be someone who understands Marketing and Advertising and has experiences with computer, social media, and graphics. It can be divided into several roles as a team, depending on your budget, business size and marketing plans.

💡 Social Media Management Tools

There are a few social media management tools out there that you can try around. (E.g. Hootsuite, Buffer, and Everypost)

You can create the things you want to post and schedule a time you want it published.
You can decide which networks you want to share them on.
You can collaborate with your co-workers to let them help you along the road to social media success.

👉 4 steps to get it started

Create a social media plan.
Set up accounts on chosen social media sites.
Sign up to a social media management tool
Create a list of posts to be automatically posted in the coming weeks.

💡 Paid Advertising on Social Networks

Social media are free for users who share and browse the topics they like. Once social media start getting more users in their networks, they will start providing advertising options for those who wanna get exposure to the targeted users who are interested in your posts.

👉 Display your Ads when people browse content

Social media sites can help you narrow down your audience even more. It provides great options for targeting ads or content to very specific audiences based on their profile activity preference setting. Get a promoted post so you can reach people who aren’t necessarily following you yet.

👉 Who can Target Ads reach?

Users who have posted similar content.
Users who have liked similar posts.
Users who match your choices of Location & Age groups.

💡 Measure Impact of Social Media Effort

You can learn a lot about who your connections are, how they behave, and how they consume or interact with the content you’re providing. It helps you understand exactly how and where your efforts are paying off. That way you can keep improving your social media strategy.

👉 Collect data from the networks themselves

Using the data and tools available from the social networks themselves.

👉 Social management Tools

Those tools can also track and provide data that can compare the different networks against each other, and give you all that reporting in one place.

👉 Monitoring tools

These tools will scour all the social networks out there looking for mentions of you, your competitors, or even certain themes being talked about. These can help you identify new social networks you might want to participate in, and let you join conversations about your business or your industry.

👉 Web analytics tools

See what social visitors are doing on your website. Know what’s happening after someone decides to click on a link you shared, or a piece of content you posted and ends up on your website

💡 No-Nos of social media

👉 It’s not all about you
Anyone who follows you on social media is already interested in you. There’s no need to aggressively sell. Just focus on the topic itself and build more interest and trust.

👉 No need to end Negative feedback in disaster
You will get any random feedback from the post comments which might not be all positive. Even though it can be an opportunity to show your customers - and everyone else who might be watching - that you truly want to help them.

👉 Don’t spread yourself too thin on social media
With all the networks out there, there are almost unlimited opportunities to talk to customers, but those conversations take time. Be patient and keep consistent on your topic and trust you are planting the seeds.

👉 Inactive for months
It might make people wonder if anything’s stirring over there or if you’re even in business anymore. And your competitors might spread some unreal rumours about you to your audiences.

🚩 TIPS: Measure what your efforts are actually doing for you.

Using social media and analytics tools, you can see firsthand how your social media efforts are contributing to your bottom line, and learn which are more valuable than others.