Creating your social media strategy doesn’t need to be stressful. With a little bit of organisation and planification, the task can be optimised, lightened and even quite fun! Taking the time to create a strategy is the key to reach your business and marketing goals rapidly. In this article, we will explain how to optimise a social media strategy adapted to your business in the easy way.
Social media strategy: what is it?
A social media strategy is a document that bring together your goals, the tactics and the tools to reach them and the metrics to measure your progress. In this document, you should list your different social media accounts (Facebook, Instagram, etc.) and plan specific goals depending on your digital strategy. Please keep in mind that your goals must me measurable and attainable (for example double my followers on Instagram, increase my sales of a specific product or service by x%, gain x new customers from a specific target audience in 6 months….).
You can support your social media strategy by using different tools. We listed below 9 of the best tools and practice to help you:
1st Tool - The Social Media Planner
Use a Social Media Planner to operate your social accounts more efficiently (and post at the most appropriate times to reach your audience). From a single dashboard, you will be able to schedule posts, manage comments, messages, set up a calendar and track social handle mentions on all your social media accounts (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Google My Business). Plus, you can keep an update photos and visuals library accessible to anyone!
I recommend one of the two following platforms :
- Later is a great free option (for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Linkedin) but does not include Google My Business.
- Sendible (£21.00 per month) a complete social media management package including 6 social profiles and 1 user.
Tip!
To start with, you can use Facebook Business suite (planner) to schedule posts and stories on both Facebook page and Instagram.
2nd Tool - Bitly
Bitly.com is a free tool that enables you to shorten long URL links, share on social, track the number of clicks and from which social media platform they are coming. In the paid version Bitly enables to create QR Codes to add to your Ads visuals (even outside social media publications) to keep track of your performance ! If you don’t like Bitly, there are many other tracking tools similar to Bitly such as Click magic, clickmeter, Trck.Me….
3rd Tool - Posting Calendar
Set up a yearly posting calendar (on Excel or Trello) with one page per month to help you plan your posts ahead. You can share it with your team so each of you can contribute and add events!
Your posting calendar should be consistent. You can create a post for the launch of your products, practical information, storytelling, USP, referral, special offers…The key here is to create and share the content regularly to be as long as possible visible by your audience. For each subject, you should create one post with one visual for each of them.
Tip!
You can use the dates of Special Occasions: New Year, St Patrick’s day, mother’s/father’s day, Christmas, Thanksgiving, Valentines day, Easter, School Holidays, Diwali, Halloween, Queen’s Platinium Jubilee, Wimbledon, FIFA World Cup, Movember, Black Friday, Business anniversary, Birthdays of founders...
4th Tool - Use Canva for your illustrations
If you are not an expert graphic designer, Canva is a fantastic graphic design platform. You can use it to create social media graphics, posters, presentation, documents and a lot of few others illustrations for your business. Canva offers a lot of templates and it’s free to use. Alternatively you can ask a graphic Designer (like me 😉) to design a small collection of blank templates (in line with the visual identity of your business). Then you just need to add photos / texts to create posts and a consistent Branding.
5th Tool – Hashtags
To increase your visibility and reach your target audience, hashtags are an important part of social media strategy. You can create lists of handy Hashtags on a word document, for example specific lists for each topic, and save time for your next posts.
Make sure you have a relevant mix of very popular (over 100k to 500k related posts), popular (10 to 100k related posts), niche (<10k) and branded hashtags (name and/or motto). Read my article about Hashtags here.
You can research on Instagram for Hashtags popularity or on best-hashtags.com. You will find a list of Hashtags linked to your industry but also the number of posts with these hashtags.
Tips!
- Keep a copy of the Hashtags on your mobile phone as well.
- Try different hashtags mix with similar content to see if they perform better.
- For special occasion, do not forget to add contextual hashtags (#christmas, #easter...)
6th Tool – List of relevant Accounts
Create a list of accounts names (@xxx) for all pages, people, influencers, businesses, partners that you will tag regularly in your posts so you don’t have to search for them. They may share your content and increase reach!
7th Tool – Use templates
Keep templates of recurring posts (with hashtags) on a word document to copy/paste and save time.
8th Tool – Use a Cloud
Set up a cloud (for example Google Drive or Dropbox) to share and access your photos/visuals/videos, documents database from any computer, mobile phone, or tablet.
Tip!
Google Drive offers 15GB of free storage when you have a Google email address.
9th Tool – Monitoring and Performance Reports
Monitor performances of each social media account per post to keep a record of your progress. You can use Excel, for example, to write the performance of each social media (followers, numbers of post, number of likes, number of visits, number of stories shared…). Each social media is different. We advise you to do one board for each and keep it up to date.
There are many ways to make management of your social media platforms easier and quicker so you can spend your time more efficiently on your business growth. But at some point it can also make sense to delegate this task so you can focus on the parts of your business where you have more added value. Then we’ll be happy to help, contact us !