The Social Media Strategy to Follow in 2022
Tvery strategy could have loopholes you did not know about, mistakes you didn’t know you made, and things you did not know you could improve. That is why we have collaborated with influencers and marketers to create a social media strategy to blow you away in 2022.
First things first, though. We will outline why you need a social media strategy, and what we have decided to do with the one we are presenting before you.
Following a Goal-Oriented Social Media Strategy
We all know that numbers and results count more than ever now. If you can’t pull in results, you cannot do the work. The social media landscape is rife with competition, content, and an almost oversaturation of social media platforms that it is tough to really stand out amongst the crowd.
That is why developing a strategy is to first play according to the numbers game. Innovation comes when you have the means to do so. This strategy is not necessarily for those with sky-high budgets and over-the-top marketing teams willing to go above and beyond.
One Social Media Strategy for All
Instead, this is for the everyman, the local business that just wants to pull in enough customers to break even this fiscal year, and the lone entrepreneur who wants to market their latest investment.
That is why a single social media strategy (for one platform) is better than having multiple ones. People prefer familiarity above risk, and so do investors.
Regardless of where your goals may be, this guide has you covered.
1. Set the Right Goals for Your Social Media Strategy
Before creating any strategy, there has to be a goal set for it. We need to understand what we are doing with that strategy, what goal we seek to accomplish, before we even go through creating the strategy itself.
Your social media strategy is no different than that. You need to first take your time and define the goals for your business. Without those goals, you won’t particularly have a real way to determine if your social media strategy is successful in the first place.
Setting realistic, attainable goals is the key. Don’t reach for the moon if you cannot build a house on the earth.
With that in mind, here are a few examples of the ‘goals’ you can set for your social media strategy in 2022:
- Increasing sales and generating leads.
- Increasing brand exposure and awareness.
- Increasing the brand’s audience and market reach.
- Improving community engagement opportunities.
- Increasing website traffic.
All these can follow certain numbers criterion that net them as a success or something else. These generate more value than they do actual revenue, so keep in mind that more exposure is only beneficial if that exposure is put to good use.
2. Invest Your Time in Researching Your Niche
Not all websites, businesses, products, or services are created equal. Your particular niche as something unique about it that separates itself from the rest.
Learn what it is, so you can play to your strengths, or cultivate your brand as something for all while still catering to your die-hard fans in a more passionate way.
Keep in mind the social media platform you use as well. Using one social media strategy is all well and good, but there are different unique features about different social media platforms that could benefit or hamper your current social media strategy.
Keep this minutia in mind before moving forward.
3. Understand the Target Market
The great thing about the internet and social media is that all the information you need is already available. Marketers just need to know where to look to find what they need.
The knowledge that different platforms are best for different markets is also paramount. For example, Facebook is more popular among the older generations, while Twitter, Discord, YouTube, and Instagram are more for the general audiences.
Add to that TikTok, where you will find much younger audiences and creators alike. A social media platform like LinkedIn, however, is for professional edutainment and similar audiences.
There are a host of other data points you could utilize for your social media strategy, such as if you use Google Analytics or a Content Management System (CRM).
- A dashboard can be crucial to help you understand a general viewpoint of who does what on your website.
- Which sites attract which kind of age range, customer type, market niches, etc., are always important to keep a note of for present and future projects.
- You don’t need data collection done over years anymore. It is already done and publicly available in some cases.
4. Establish KPIs and Metrics Beforehand
Not all metrics are important for your social media strategy, so understanding what to measure, how to measure it, and the targets you need to set for it are critical.
The total number of sales after you launch your social media strategy campaign does very little to tell the whole story. Consider what makes a social media strategy and campaign successful before you dive into one. The follow strategic KPI metrics could help you on that path:
Outreach
Understanding whether or not your content is generating the type of buzz you need can start with the most basic aspect of them all; views.
The reach of your post can be attributed almost entirely to views. It should tell you the number of unique users who saw your post, as well as the total number of views.
A chart or graph that showcases the number of views over a time period can also benefit, as you will understand what type of social media strategy aspect worked and what did not.
Clicks
Clicks help understand what drives traffic. Similar to views, the more the clicks, and the more ‘social media friendly’ your content is. This can range from hot takes and controversial posts to genuinely positive customer sentiment.
Clicks help you understand that path of curiosity for a customer. They range from just the number of clicks to which page of your website was most visited, which product was clicked most often, etc., for some invaluable insights.
Customer Engagement
Think of this as the ratio between the views and the clicks. If one of every ten customers that view your social media strategy content actually interact with it, you have got yourself a hyper-successful social media strategy.
For reference, marketers agree that a 1-5% customer engagement rate is incredibly difficult, which means only your most viral content will ever reach the higher percentage.
Hashtag/Hyperlink performance
If your customers use your hashtag, you get more and more awareness and market exposure. So, tracking the hashtags that work and those that are rarely ever used can net you some important aspects to focus on.
Perhaps your most popular hashtags are that of your products, so you may work on more slogans and more ‘hashtag table’ names in your next social media strategy!
Organic/Paid Likes and Traffic
The difference between a paid like and an organic like is determined by whether the customer engaged on a promoted post or on their own accord. Organic traffic and customer engagement are two of the most difficult KPIs to truly hit in any social media strategy.
Customer Sentiment
This is always a bonus rather than a fully-fledged KPI. Customer sentiment can be measured in how your customers react (positively or negatively) to aspects of your social media strategy, such as content, hashtag, or the brand itself.
Are customers more agitated in your recent showings, or have they recently begun to be more positive in their sentiment? All this is a measurable metric that can determine your long-term market reputation.
5. Nurture Your Social Media Content
It goes without saying that content is one of the most important things in your social media strategy. Without content, none of your social media aspects actually work.
However, you should not just create some content and call it a day. You need to constantly look for improvements, where you made mistakes, whether your customer sentiment is changing, and much more.
Nurture your content and ensure that it stays fresh without losing the overall theme that your content was going for. Consistency works best when paired with innovation in content. Use your social media strategy to your advantage and find the best ways in which to present your content using fresh new means.
6. Record, Rate, Revise, Repeat
A social media strategy is not a set-it and forget-it type of an ordeal. You have to make sure that you are changing it around, just like the content itself.
You need to ‘record, rate, revise, and repeat,’ which means you need to track your progress, determine its efficacy, change what needs to be changed, and repeat this process again.
These four steps might be an over simplification of what you need to do, but they go a long way in making an effective social media strategy. After all, simplicity trumps everything else.
7. Don’t Be Afraid to Collaborate Across Departments
One of the best things about social media marketing is that it is always demanding for fresh new perspectives. It is not necessarily a marketing department that can give valuable insights on your social media strategy.
Instead, you can bring other departments into the mix, and inform your social media strategy with their ideas as well to diversify your content portfolio. The data you use and generate could even be used to provide support yourself to other departments as well.
- HR can benefit from employer branding initiatives that the social media strategy can utilize to benefit the organization while also creating some buzz.
- Sales teams always benefit from more insight.
- What department is closer (and farthest) from the customer than the production department?
All these create an excellent opportunity to collaborate and refine not just your social media strategy, but the entire brand as a whole—even the organization.
Conclusion
Making a social media strategy is neither easy nor is it a one-time thing. You need to always be on your toes, ready to pounce on the next aspect to grab onto for some content.
About the Author!
Fred Collins, a digital marketing head that creates social media strategies of Logocorps, based in California, have written many columns defining techniques right from the scratch that how to engage more traffic to the site by using some amazing hacks to help the ones who are doing in-depth research about this particular field.
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