social media strategy — hi impact task 1– blog – 2017

How many of you would be willing to pack the family car and drive off to vacation without first deciding where you are going, what to pack, how long to stay, or what you’re going to do? Having a plan is what makes your vacation a success. This is what social media strategy does for you. It maps out your destination and how you’re going to get there.

Determining your social media strategy is the most important and impactful task. This is where you focus your goals and develop the roadmap to reach those goals. It amazes me how many skip this MOST IMPORTANT step. How do you know if you’ve arrived if you don’t know what the destination is?

Deciding what to do is usually the easiest step. There’s plenty of information on the web about what Apple, or Ulta, or Toyota are doing. Knowing the How is harder. Do you do it yourself? Do you need some training? Do you need some help?

However, the hardest thing to identify is the Why. If you don’t know why, your approach will be scattershot and likely unproductive and frustrating.

Why Social Media Strategy is a Good Investment

There are many goals that your social media strategy could focus on. The danger would be focusing on too many goals or the wrong goals. Looking at your overall organizational goals is a good place to start. Looking at the big picture, how can social media impact your whole business? The second question to ask is what you want your social media to do for you? Are you looking to create brand awareness, build community, drive traffic to your website or increase sales? Maybe you want to boost brand engagement or generate new leads. Taking the time to step back and build a framework for what you want your social media to do is a critical first step to your business success. Don’t pick more than 3 goals!

How Social Media Strategy Should Work

Once you’ve identified your three goals, try to get more specific with your objectives. For example, we want to increase the number of attendees at our webinars by 20% by the end of 2018. An objective is always specific and has a number and date attached to it.

Think about strategies to accomplish your goals and objectives. Some examples might be:

—Grow your newsletter list

—Launch a marketing campaign

—Increase engagement with millennials

—Launch a blog or new blog series

—Create downloadable content

—Develop influencer outreach

—Run an online ad campaign

What Does a Good Social Media Strategy Look Like?

The final step to your social media strategy will be to map out the specific steps or tactics necessary to accomplish your goals. Assign people and dates to each tactic necessary to develop the strategies.

Be sure to identify the data that tracks and measures your success. Although follows, likes, shares and comments are great, there are other meaningful things to measure. What do you want the data to tell you? Some of the meaningful data that we are measuring includes Click through Rate, Share of Traffic, Share of Voice and Amplification Rate.

We’ll talk more about this later in our series.

Be Flexible

The beauty of keeping track of your data is that you can tweak tactics as you go. Posting times, hashtags, types of content, how much you promote versus share OPC (Other People’s Content) can all be adjusted as you go through the process.

Be flexible and don’t be afraid to try something new!