6 simple and executable steps to create your Social Media Strategy with success

Surely you’ve heard or read how important your brand is present in social networks: audiences are online and you have to go look for them . Certainly, behind a social media strategy there are many  benefits specific to your business, we’ll see later.

But to make the most of your efforts on digital marketing , you have to draw an intelligent plan . Give that I will speak today! Then I will explain how to create your Social Media Strategy step by step to  obtain concrete benefits for your business.

Step 1: Define the objectives of your Social Media Strategy

As I said above, use social networks not only helps you broadcast your brand , but it can be the perfect solution to correct a number of situations related to your business. In this regard, in this step we will see what goals you can reach through a are social media strategy for you to establish your own goals based on the needs of your company. Define this in advance will help you channel your efforts to get the best results.

The objectives of your Social Media strategy include:

1. Strengthen your Customer Service: to engage your audience, nothing better than to meet the needs of your audience, and for that social networks can help a lot. This is your social accounts are the platform through which trained personnel in your company can respond to inquiries from your customers .
2. Increase Web Traffic: You can target your Social Media strategy to offer attractive content that includes links to your site . That way your social networks operate as a portal of entry of new visitors.
3. Boost Your Brand Recognition: If this is your goal, you have to put the focus on creating quality content that reflect the identity you want to give your business proposition. You must also connect with influential users or influencers , to help you extend the reach of your message to your target audience.
4. Improve Your Sales: Social networks can also function as a space to attract people to your products. For this you can combine the inclusion of links to key sections of your website by publishing frequent postings (individual updates and photo albums) to present your collections and products.
5. Retain your customers: Finally, your Social Media strategy can be the ideal way to maintain a relationship with your audience, after a trade has been made. Share publications that offer added value and respond to inquiries and comments will help you build a bond with your followers, which will increase the chances that choose to stay with your brand.

Step 2: Know your target audience

Once you have defined your points to achieve (goals), the time comes to identify  the characteristics of your audience . Do is vitally important, as this will allow you to know who you go with your communications , and therefore can better select the content you are publishing, thinking about satisfying a particular reader profile.

Note that in the process of buying different parties are involved: the decision maker (who decides what to buy), the influential (who influences the decision to purchase), the buyer (who pays the price) and the user (who uses the product ). There are products in which these 4 characters come together in one person, for example when the person buys a drink for lunch. However, there are products where each party is represented by a different person, for example in buying diapers: the decider, probably the baby’s mother, an influential may be the pediatrician, the buyer could be the baby ‘s father and user baby. So in these cases you must define who / is going to spend your communications, in order to concentrate on the / the.

Once you have identified your target audience, you must characterize to ensure that information you share on social networks will generate  added value  (eg useful information, customer service, entertainment, etc.), and you’ll be positioning itself in the minds of this public so you choose when buying. Below is a list of data that will help you characterize your target audience:

Step 3: Perform an audit of Social Media to know your status on social networks

Once you have defined the or the goals that need to achieve with your social media strategy  and have identified your target audience, time to know what the current status of your brand in social media arrives. To do this it is best to conduct an audit or control, that will help you know where you are standing in the field of Social Media Marketing .

To help in this task, since Postcron team we’ve put together a spreadsheet that will guide you in your process of Social Media Audit, across 6 distinct steps. These steps or stages are:

• Step 1: Registering your current social profiles in a spreadsheet.
• Step 2: identification of accounts that can be represented your brand.
• Step 3: setting a target for each profile.
• Step 4: checking the authenticity of your accounts.
• Step 5: optimizing the management of your passwords.
• Step 6: the definition of a protocol for the future management of your social networks.

Please click on the image below  to download your form Social Media Audit . If it is the first time your brand appear on social networks, you can skip this step. However, I advise you to perform this monitoring process a few weeks or months after implementing your social media strategy to check that everything is working properly.

Step 4: Choose the best channels to spread your proposals

After defining the objectives you pursue through your social media strategy and know what your status on social networks, it’s time to determine what the best channels to spread your proposals . Indeed, each network has its own style and characteristics, it is necessary to know in order to select the most appropriate measures to promote the growth of your business . Therefore, in this section we will review the most important:

• Facebook: on the one hand, this network is the most important today, which reached  advertising services , as it allows you to segment the audience very effectively to maximize the effectiveness of your ads.

As for your social media strategy , I suggest include Facebook in your content distribution channels. You’ll be able to capitalize on the Section News to reach your fans with your proposals, especially if your goals are included among Promote your brand recognition and increase your web traffic .

• Twitter: This social network is perfect for, as proposed by its slogan, join the conversation . Indeed, there about 350 thousand tweets are posted every minute  from different parts of the world, why it is very possible that your trademark is named by #hashtags (topical) or @mentions (citation users) within that incessant avalanche publications in real time.

Because of its great dynamism, Twitter is perfect to accomplish your goal of Strengthen Customer . So you can propose hashtags linked to frequent queries (try to be as specific as possible, for example #planesdepagodepostcron ), so you can easily find queries. Similarly, I advise check your private messages frequently to address concerns of your customers.

This social network is also effective to boost your brand awareness and increase your web traffic . To do this you must produce quality content that encourage the audience to click on your links and achieve achieve multiply your CTR on Twitter .

• LinkedIn: This social network dedicated to the professional world, has  148 different industries represented in the pages of companies , which offered more than 1.3 million products and services . In addition, LinkedIn has more than 300 million users worldwide, of which 39 million are students and recent graduates . For all these reasons, this social network is perfect for your brand in industry and find qualified employees for your business.

In addition, LinkedIn is an ideal place for the development of trade relations space type B2B , ie, the Business to Business . For these reasons, I suggest this network include in your social media strategy , especially if among your goals are to increase your sales and Promote Your Brand Recognition .

• Pinterest: If your goal is to increase your sales , Pinterest is an excellent way to achieve this . As you can see in the image below, the search of this network is optimized to show users of your product photos in high resolution, which can filter by categories. You must also keep in mind that the audience is composed Pinterest women by 85% , making it ideal for promoting products and services to satisfy that segment of the population.

• Google+: the importance of including this social network within your social media strategy has to do mainly to improve SEO positioning your content . Because its developers are also the most used search engine, it is important you to spread your proposals through this channel. For example, if you can consolidate your presence in the Social Network when people google it your brand will see a box with information about your business  in search results.

Step 5: Generate content that bring added value to your audience

As we have said, add value in your content is a key aspect of your social media strategy , since it largely depends on the users decide to follow. So, now that you know who dirigirás your message, it’s time to select the content you will share through your social networks .

At this point, I advise you to resort to two tools to decide on what topics you should talk to your publications (beyond your promotional updates), depending on the shared or requested by people issues. One is BuzzSumo an online search tool that lets you know what the most popular publications are on social networks and in specific domains. The other tool is Google Trends , a service of Google that tells you about what the top searches performed by users, and what topics are trendsetters.

So, with the help of these tools you can choose t emas truly interested public to discuss them in your social networks . This will help you attract readers to your content and new followers to your accounts.

Tip: Once you have your generated content, use tools like Postcron to gallery of Contents so you can look at it posts to share if you do not own content for the whole month.

Step 6: Analyze the performance of your Social Media Strategy through statistics

Finally, the last step in creating a social media strategy sustainable over time  is to analyze your performance in social media. Specifically, it is that you can know what the impact of your communications in your different social networks, to know what times you got a better response from the public (and so make sure to publish them). You should also discuss what types of content are those that have generated a greater number of interactions by your audience, in order to guide your editorial strategy.

Thus, each of the social networks mentioned in this article provide users the opportunity to learn statistics on the performance of its publications in areas specified time. To learn more about each of these services, I recommend taking a look at our article Statistics of Social Networks for Community Managers .

Thus, access metrics obtained in your various social networks will help you determine what your audience preferences are and therefore you can optimize your posts based on such information.

Be sure to carry out these 6 steps and you can create your own social media strategy successfully. Then tell us!

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