A social media plan, whether for your own business or for your clients, is a valuable marketing tool that will increase brand awareness and build relationships with potential customers. At first, it can seem overwhelming to create a social media strategy; but when completed step-by-step, it really is a simple and uncomplicated process. Follow the steps below to create a thorough social media plan that will generate organic traffic and give both you and your clients results.
Identify Your Goals & Objectives
Before you even open Facebook, Instagram, or Snapchat, you need to define your overarching goal with social media. Do you want to:
- Increase brand awareness?
- Gain followers?
- Build relationships through engagement?
- Lead customers to your website?
- Increase email subscribers?
Your overall social media goal may include all of these objectives, but you need to define the main priority before you begin sharing any posts. Many online companies want to increase their brand awareness before they begin selling to their audience. Other businesses, such as e-commerce companies, see social media as a gateway that will lead future customers to their website. As a virtual assistant, you may want to focus on building relationships, increasing email subscribers, or developing brand awareness. It really does depend on what your specific goal is for your particular business.
What’s Already Working?
Most businesses have some kind of social media strategy in place already. They may not realize it but they do. If you have a current social media business account, take some time to review your past posts. Are there specific posts that have engaged more followers than others?
If you aren’t active on social media yet, then you need to take the next step, which is to research the competition. Review social media accounts of other companies in your specific niche. Take note of the type of posts they share and how their followers engage with those posts. Be sure to research accounts that have a large following with hundreds, if not thousands, of likes, comments, and shares. This will help spark ideas of the type of posts, photos, and videos you can use for your own social media strategy.
Create or Update Social Media Accounts
Now that you know what you want your social media strategy to accomplish, and you have ideas of what is already working for others in your area of expertise, it’s time to create or update your current social media accounts. Although this will be completed with your particular goals and business in mind, there are basic fields of a social media business account that need to be completed, such as:
- Contact information.
- Website address.
- About information.
- Profile picture.
- Banner images.
When creating images for these social media profiles, be sure to use social media images that are correctly sized for the specific platform you are using. You can find these by conducting an online search for “correct images for social media”. Once the basic fields and images are in place, the rest of your social media profile can be optimized and updated as you build your online following.
In the next blog post, we’ll reveal the last three steps to building an effective social media strategy.
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