How to Outline your Social Media Strategy

Social Media .... Strategy?!

Yes! Believe it or not, if you are a business trying to win at the social media marketing game, you NEED to come at it with a plan and a strategy. Not only that, depending on how much of your marketing goes into social media, you need to revisit this plan at least yearly... or even quarterly. Social media marketing is so much more than just posting pictures of your product on Facebook with a link, Twitter and Instagram and hoping the traffic will just flow in. In fact, that is exactly what NOT to do.

Coming up with a social media strategy is the important first step for any social media marketer to gain meaningful brand awareness, engagement and site traffic or sales for their business.

If you're not sure about how to get started with your strategy, you're in the right place. This post will help you put together a basic outline for establishing your social media marketing plan.

If you are running an commerce site or other online business, social media is probably a small part of a larger marketing plan. I take a look at my full marketing plan every year after Christmas and make the following evaluations:

• data from the previous year
• what worked and what didn't work in the previous year's plan
• my goals for the coming year

After taking a good look at each of those points is when I sit down and create a marketing plan – including the social media marketing plan – for the coming year.

For any marketing strategy, there are obviously two parts: planning and implementation. This post will focus only on the planning part.

1. What are your goals for social media?

Before creating any kind of plan, it's important to set forth your goals. 

• Are you trying to drive traffic to your site?
• Are you trying to build brand awareness?
• Do you want to provide customer support for your current customers?
• Do you want to increase customer loyalty?

These are just some of the possible goals you might be working towards with your social media marketing. Establishing these at the beginning will not only help guide you in creating your plan, but it will also help you in measuring and evaluating your implementation to determine if your methods are working.

2. What networks are you going to focus on?

There are SO many social media networks out there. It can be a little daunting when you're just getting started with your plan. The good news is, you don't have to be on all of them. In fact, I would suggest NOT being on all of them.

Think about which networks your target audience uses and interacts with. That's a good place to start. For instance, if you're targeting a younger / millennial type crowd, SnapChat and Instagram might be where you want to spend the bulk of your time. Facebook provides a broader audience base, and Pinterest skews towards women.

Here is a (certainly not complete) list of social media networks you should research to determine if it is right for your demographic.

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Instagram
• Pinterest
• Tumblr
• SnapChat
• LinkedIn
• YouTube
• Reddit

But it's not only important to know which networks you need to use. It's also important to understand how users expect to be interacted with on these sites. Reddit users are notoriously put off by blatant marketing / advertising accounts that don't provide value to discussion. Facebook hinders Newsfeed distribution of posts that it deems low quality or uninteresting. 

After you choose the networks you plan to focus on, take some time to read about those networks and spend time on them as a user so that you understand fundamentally how they operate. No one really wants to see hashtags on Facebook, but you won't survive on Instagram without using hashtags liberally.

3. What actionable tactics can you use on these networks to achieve your goals?

As mentioned above, it's important to think about your posts and content from the perspective of the user.

• Is this something they are going to notice?
• Will this post be considered annoying or just adding junk to their feed?
• Is your post engaging / thought provoking / cute / fun / (whatever adjective you're going for to achieve your goals from #1.)

It's important to physically plan out and write down real-world actionable tactics you plan to use for each network that will work towards your goals. 

For instance, one of my tactics this year is providing a weekly recipe directly on my Facebook and Instagram pages to provide direct, free content to my customer base. Now, each Monday, I take the time to write out one of my recipes (which are already available on my website) on Facebook and Instagram along with a photo.

4. Your Social Media Strategy 

That's really all there is to it. Go back and evaluate your strategy from time to time. See what's working and not working. 

I also find it's helpful to create a chart or use a planner to make sure you're keeping up with your social media plan implementation. Since this may require daily or weekly posts actions, this can help keep you on track.

Here's an outline of how your social media strategy should start to look: