4 Points To Consider While Defining Your Social Media Plan

It’s a given that a business without an online brand identity can’t thrive, in this time and age. And if it is unable to engage with its customers, prospects and the world at large – the scenario is even worse! A 2013 research conducted by Constant Contact revealed that over 50% of small businesses need help with social media.

The good thing is 93% of B2B marketers surveyed in CMI’s latest B2B Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends report stated that their company uses social media. However, only 50% of them considered their social media tactics to be successful.

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This clearly shows that “simply posting” updates across all social channels is not enough – and the efforts to engage with the target market are futile. Marketers must make a strategic decision about their company’s use of social media and ensure that every step is carefully defined. And to be honest, a lot has to do with “content”.

Here’s what they can do:

1. Reassess the content type for target audience

In order to have a strong social presence, you should be clear about two things:

• Your audience
• Social channels used to target them

Based on this information, it is easy to understand what works on which platform and why. There are instances where the same blog post doesn’t work on multiple networking channels. And there are some posts that do well universally.

Identify those types of content to optimize your strategizing and writing efforts to gain maximum traffic to social channels, blog and official website. Curate colourful or inspiring content – depending upon your industry – that can be promoted across all social media platforms.

However, when it comes to running a specific campaign, make sure you choose the platform wisely. Quizzes, for instance, attract massive participation. They also allow you to extract useful data. Quizzes, fortunately, do well on Facebook and Twitter – which are the top most social media channels in the world. Keep conducting quizzes, every now and then, to attract prospects.

Hence, when it comes to “content”, focus on the “curation” aspect, rather than “writing”. The correct words will follow suit and so will the audience.

2. Choose a signature style and tone

Despite its increasing relevance in the digital space, social media is still considered a relaxed platform. Therefore, your social strategy must be adept at conveying complex issues in simple words or infographics or videos to engage a broad audience. There are no two ways about it.

But how can you achieve this goal?

By striking the right (emotional) chord with the target audience. An interesting study by Harvard Business Review revealed that marketing campaigns evoked at least one of the following “emotions” among the users:

• Admiration
• Interest
• Serenity
• Amazement
• Astonishment

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Do you realize how many opportunities you have lost till now because your social media campaigns didn’t have an emotional element in them – and even if they did, you never banked on those emotions?

The key to score maximum likes, mentions, shares and retweets across your social media channels is by combining two or three of the above-mentioned emotions into your messaging. The results will be phenomenal!

3. Bifurcate content for each platform

As mentioned before, you should optimize your social media efforts to reach out to maximum people. This means that your content should be shared universally – on all your platforms. While blogs, industry/company news, campaign announcements, etc. must be pushed out everywhere, every social channel has a speciality of its own.

• Facebook is convenient for promoting entertaining content, besides visual content messages less than 100 characters.
• Twitter is useful for sharing business tips, along with visual content with 70-100 characters messages.
• LinkedIn is perfect for promoting everything related to the brand and of course, thought leadership content and industry news.
• Often considered a “necessary evil”, Google+  comes in handy for sharing technical how-to content, GIFs and blog posts.
• Pinterest offers an amazing platform to create and share infographics.
• Instagram is useful for sharing brand-related visual content such as photos, creatives and 10-second videos.

Here it is also important to track the content performance on each of the social platforms you are making use of. It is important to observe how your target audience responds to various types of content and which marketing messages resonate the best with them. Adalyz provides you with those powerful analytics and reporting for multiple digital campaigns via a unified dashboard.

4. Identify the right time to share content

There is always an optimal time and day for everything on social media. For instance, according to TrackMaven, Instagram engagement is consistent throughout the week with a slight spike on Mondays. For others:

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Although this rule might not apply to all brands and industries, making a social media plan around it is worth the try. At least, it gives some sort of time-bound relevance to content. Sporadic social posting won’t fetch results. You have to ensure that all the platforms are aggressively driven – and periodically.

Lastly…

Take notes from the social media plans executed before. There is nothing better than analyzing how well they fared (in terms of traction and ROI) and pushed the business forward. Analyze your competitors’ social media presence and understand where and how you should be socially active. Identify the content types working for them.

Remember: Without content, organic social media efforts can’t yield results. So, strengthen your content assets before making any other marketing effort.