Taking the Questions Out of Social Media

A social media marketing plan is the summary of everything you plan to do and hope to achieve for your business using social networks. This plan should comprise an audit of where your accounts are today, goals for where you want them to be in the near future, and all the tools you want to use to get there.

In general, the more specific you can get with your plan, the more effective you’ll be in its implementation. Try to keep it concise. Don’t make your social media marketing strategy so lofty and broad that it’s unattainable. The plan will guide your actions, but it will also be a measure by which you determine whether you’re succeeding or failing. You don’t want to set yourself up for failure from the outset.

Developing a plan is key to making sure that you are aligning your scarce resources to the goals you are trying to achieve. Here are the elements of a social media plan.

“Developing a social media plan is key to making sure that you are aligning your scarce resources to the goals you are trying to achieve. “

Step 1: Know Your Ideal Customer

Be as specific as possible with this part. For example, if you identified your market as teenagers that’s a start. However, it is better to hone it down to a teenager that enjoys music, and is about to go to college and prefers Facebook over other social networks and enjoys camping. Even the best marketers will fail if they are marketing to the wrong audience.

Step 2: Determine Which Social Networks Apply

Once you have a good sense of your ideal customer, you should determine which of the social networks will be most fruitful for your efforts. Keep in mind that you may want to have your presence across multiple social media sites even if they don’t nail your customer demographic (i.e., you may want to have Instagram even though your market is baby boomers) to enhance your overall presence, but you should be clear about which social media networks hold the most promise.

Step 3: Set Your Goals and Metrics

How will you determine if your social media marketing efforts are successful? I am not just talking about gaining more followers, I am talking about making money. After all, it is hard to rationalize spending time and money on something that isn’t improving the bottom line.

Step 4: Create Great Content

Sadly, many businesses jump straight to this step. Hopefully this post has made it clear that there are several vital steps that you must take before you start creating and curating engaging content to share on your social media channels.

Let’s now discuss the fun part, posting to social media. You know who your ideal customer is and you used that information to create your social media mission statement. Armed with this information it should be easy for you to begin creating and curating content. So, what exactly is considered content? Here are a few examples of content you could create:

• Images
• Videos
• Blog Posts
• Company News
• Infographics
• eBooks
• Interviews

The list of content ideas goes on and on, but make sure you focus only on forms of content that align with your mission statement, as well as your skill set. Content is what fuels social media, so it is crucial that you consider creating high quality, engaging content as a top priority.