1. Research Your Competitors: Researching your competitor is a crucial step that a lot of marketers forget in social media marketing, but you don’t want to miss this one. It can tell you what’s working for your competition. You can then use that valuable insight to inform and improve your own campaigns.
Uncovering your competitors’ social media strategies will allow you to create an even stronger one for your brand, giving you the edge. You can do your research manually, or you can use competitor research tools to compile the data for you.
2. Craft Your Strategy: Before you do anything else, create a solid strategy for your campaigns. Strategy can become complex, but start by breaking it down to the basics.
3. Promote One Message with Different Forms of Content: You should have finalized the messaging you want to use in the previous step. Now, in this stage, you’ll use different formats to deliver that message, such as infographics, videos, and blog posts, to see what works best.
4. Strike A Balance Between Promotional and Non-Promotional Content: That balance is particularly important because of Facebook’s new algorithm. If you share only promotional content on social media, people will become uninterested and stop following you. If, however, you share only nonpromotional content on social media, you won’t get the kind of results you’re hoping for. So add content to your feed from external sources (content not written by you).
5. Publish Unique, Trending Content: This one sounds a bit like an oxymoron (how can content be both trending and unique?), but it’s a great strategy to use. Find trending topics or strategies and put your own unique spin on them. If many marketers are writing about how Facebook Zero is going to damage reach, for example, you should be the one who writes about how it will help businesses that make the effort to better connect with their clients.
6. Use Scheduling Software to Optimize Your Routine: Trying to create social posts on the fly isn’t going to cut it. Instead, optimize your campaigns and your routine by using scheduling software to streamline the process.
7. Use Social Listening Tools and Engage With Your Audience: Social listening tools are exceptionally powerful. They allow you to see what people are saying about your brand, which may be very different from what they’re saying to your brand.
8. Create a Unique Hashtag for Each Campaign: Hashtags are powerful entities on Instagram and Twitter. They can help drive engagement, and just as important, they can help you track the results of your campaigns. By creating a unique, branded hashtag for your brand and specific campaigns, you can more easily track engagement and user-generated content even if users don’t remember to tag your brand directly in their posts.
9. Go Live: Live streaming is a big trend in social media, and if you aren’t taking advantage of it, you’re missing a prime opportunity. Go live on Facebook or Instagram on topics related to your social campaigns. To increase engagement, host Q&A sessions and answer customer questions asked either beforehand or in the live comments.
10. Analyze Your Performance: Just because your campaigns may be underway or over doesn’t mean the work is done. Regularly analyze the success of your campaign as it progresses, and evaluate it closely once it’s over. You can get valuable insight into what worked well and what didn’t.
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