If you search online for social media strategy or social media marketing tactics you will bombarded with hundreds of article with tons of techniques. Some of them are great, while some are just fluff. But still they are worth taking a look, who knows you might get a good strategy out of them.
However for your social media strategy to work on the long run, more than anything it needs strong pillars. And fortunately there are Five social media pillars, that not only will give you a framework but will also help you understand what key areas you need to look while preparing and working on your social media strategy.
Now let’s dive in to understanding what these five social media pillars are;
Pillar. 1 Social media marketing Strategy
For a marketing plan to be successful, it needs a proper strategy. Similarly, your social media marketing plan also requires a strategy in place.
And the first step you need to do is to set your social media goals.
In this stage, to get more clarity, you should also ensure that the social media goals you have set are aligned with your marketing and business goals.
Considering the budget, time and other available channels, you should also analyze if social media is the right channel for your brand. I know this statement does sound like I am being cynical towards social media marketing, but you should choose the media channel which is best for you. Don’t follow the herd.
After doing that, you should answer these questions and deep dive into building your social media strategy:
- Who is your target audience?
- What type of content will you be posting?
- What platform will you be using to achieve your social media goals?
- What your competition is doing?
- What are the social media benchmark and metrics?
These are some of it; many other questions will get raised during the process. Remember, you should constantly revisit this social media pillar to tweak it for the best performance according to your collected data.
You can’t perfect it in one go.
Pillar. 2 Planning and Publishing
To build a consistent presence on social media, you must make your social media planning and publishing strategy as smooth as possible.
Now you don’t have to turn into Monica Geller here and start micromanaging everything, but here, you should have some SOPs placed so that from brainstorming the content idea to posting at the right time, it should function like a well-oiled engine.
Some criteria that I ensure while setting SOPs are;
- It should be easy to work with and get understood by all stakeholders. From content writers to graphic designers.
- It should be practical and efficient while aligning with social media strategy.
- It should be flexible so that you can make changes and modify it.
Here you should first start creating your own personalized social media calendar. Sophia Bernazzani, in HubSpot’s blog, has written a great article on how you can create a social media calendar.
In this stage, you should also monitor the best time to post on social media. To find that out, consider when are your target audience most active.
After that, analyze how often you should post content online to build rapport with your audience, but do not bombard them with too many posts/ads to cause them consumer fatigue (yeah, it exists).
Pillar. 3 Listening & Engagement
Okay, so if your social media is in nascent stage, you might get fewer comments on your posts, few direct messages or queries. Overall you will get less social media interaction.
However, as you post more engaging content and work on your engagement strategy, you will grow, get more social media followers, and increase your reach. Where you need to have a plan of action on how you can make online interaction worthwhile for you and your audience.
This is also where you have to keep on monitoring your online reputation. You have to see if any spam or harmful press is happening around your brand and if any work on resolving them.
You should also check if your customer is raising any pre-sales query, and here you can help them in their buying journey by assisting them. And in turn, this can make them a paying customer.
Do you know Social media has the power to both generate and warm leads?
While you can also consider this to help your customer in after-sales, you can support customers in resolving their complaints. This way, you can turn their bad experience into a good experience.
Duolingo does this exceptionally well; besides posting good content, they almost always respond to the audience’s comments. And they did this by making a funny remark or simply joking.
They are the only Alpha bird out there (if you know what I mean, if not Musk it).
Some other examples are Zappos, Netflix, and Spotify, which are rocking online customer interaction.
Pillar. 4 Analytics & Reporting
Now you love creating exciting content and have built the charm to sway your audience on social media interaction, but have you started analyzing whether your actions are bringing results? Or are they still aligned with your social media goals? Remember we created them while building a social media strategy?
If you do not, then you are making a big mistake. Because one thing analytical and reporting gives, you is Insightful Data – which you can use to strengthen your social media efforts.
Think of it this way you, above all social media pillars, are like Luke Skywalker and this Yoda, a mentor. Now who doesn’t want to learn from Jedi master Yoda?
Remember the quote, “Do or do not. There is no try.” by Yoda, meaning we must take action to achieve our goals. And here, being data-driven and analytical gives us insights into what activity we should take to achieve our goal.
You should check the platform’s inbuilt analytics tool to check the insights. Or you can also consider investing in paid tools like Buffer or Hootsuite.
Pillar. 5 Social media Advertising
To grow your social media reach, consider investing in social media advertising, which means running paid ads.
One of the best things about social media advertising is that you can reach out to customized target audiences based on their location, age, behavior, demographics and more.
And to get the best result from your organic social media marketing, combine it with social media advertising. Together if done right, both can give you enormous results. There is one excellent article by Hootsuite that you should check out.
The Wrap-up
There is no way you should start by thinking of social media pillars as actionable steps to help you reach your goal. No, they are not. And yes, they do not get you instant likes or followers.
You must consider these five social media pillars as building blocks for your social media success. You must work on all of them constantly and parallelly to wave the flag of your social media success.
If you have any query or just wanna say hi (I love making friends) do reach out to me.
