If you haven’t got a social media strategy in place yet, you’re probably putting your brand at serious risk. Whether yours is a micro business operating from your garage, or a multi-million-dollar corporation sprawling across geographies, your social media strategy is your lifeline to the health, strength, and survival of your brand and ultimately to your business.

What Is A Social Media Strategy?

In very broad terms, strategies that leverage the power of social media across all available platforms encompass a comprehensive social media plan. Studies show that nearly 50 billion people all over the world currently use social media. While until recently this use was confined to being a means to connect with people, social media has grown above and beyond this limited scope. Right now, anyone who’s on social media platforms uses it to explore trends, products, information, and news.

As a business entity, social media will help you to:

• Identify, locate, and profile your target audience
• Connect with a new generation of customers
• Collate and analyze relevant information that will boost purchases
• Help in planning for future investment and risks
• Decide on resources, skills, and financial requirements
• Fine-tune measurements and metrics
• Boost traffic, leads, and conversion
• Stay ahead of your competitors
• Enhance loyalty and attract new customers
• Stand out as a provider of relevant information
• Add value to customer experience
• Incorporate a cost-effective marketing strategy

Fine Tune a More Efficient Social Media Strategy

In today’s eco-system, there’s no need to be a Jack (or Jill) of all trades. Super-specialization is the order of the day, and whatever your need or budget, you’re sure to find the right fit to match your specs. Apps such as Sociabble are both convenient and efficient to enable dynamic and powerful social selling. It also gives your team a finely honed tool with which to drive sales, move ahead of competitors, understand and work with the corporate culture they belong to, and influence the way they communicate.

Your customer is a living, moving, and dynamic unit, with a myriad, often conflicting set of forces pulling her/him in different directions. They are situated in rich social environments that impact them powerfully. Strong and consistent messaging helps them to make faster, more convenient purchasing decisions.

Social media planning takes all these aspects into account to create a viable toolkit that syncs into the various technologies that are in use.

Putting Your Social Media Strategy Together

Foundation: A strong foundation helps your strategy to weather the storms that are bound to come your way. Ensure that you analyze exactly why you need to up your social media game, give it a makeover, or install a whole new plan.

Function: Social media strategies must be designed to communicate both externally with customers and internally with your own team. All these networks and relationships have to work smoothly with each other for surveillance and management of your brand reputation.

Targeting: Your social media strategy has to be designed keeping the exact target in mind. For instance, a brand that speaks about an anti-aging face cream speaks a very different language from one that promotes eco-friendly furniture. But your brand can also stand for certain values such as integrity, quality, or pricing even if your company sells a diverse range of products and services.

Super Social Media Strategies For Maximum Reach

Use Existing Content: If you’ve already invested in good quality content that has delivered consistent results, why not consider re-purposing and recycling? You can use video content in TikTok or other enterprise video platforms. Posts on Facebook or X can be served up again on Instagram. Blogs and vlogs can morph into short-form videos. Polls, tweets, and LinkedIn comments are all valuable nuggets of reusable social media.

Audit: A regular audit keeps your strategy lean and mean(ingful). It allows you to meet your audience where they are and pull out usable data from analytics. This is a great way to identify and locate pain points, bottlenecks, and lazy strategies.

Time It Right: Studies show that different strategies work at different times. Since audiences differ significantly across different channels, time zones, geographies, ages, and genders, it’s smart to optimize your posts based on the data you have. Choose the right platform to share your message. Studies also reveal that an average customer today has access to at least eight different social media platforms that they use for different purposes at different times. Unless you bridge these different aspects, your brand may not reach them.

Story Telling: Over the past few years, social media has finally discovered that stories are more valued than a plain vanilla sales pitch. Put a face to the name of the people you have in customer-facing positions in your company, and more, those who work behind the scenes. Give your customers a “Day in the Life of..” type of story to capture their interest and give a human touch to your brand. User-generated content in the form of testimonials, real experiences, and feedback also makes compelling reading.

Know What To Use: All of us know how annoying it is to see a post jam-packed with hashtags. This is a powerful tool to use on social media, but overuse dulls the edge. Plain text does provide information, but a strategically timed, excellent quality video is much more effective. Today’s customer prefers to watch a demo, or an unboxing video rather than read reams of text. Some brands have found that a social media series such as “How To..” or “You’re The Expert” or “Try This Today” keeps your audience interested and engaged.

Stay Connected: Make sure that your social media strategy includes a huge component of connectivity with your customers. Prompt feedback, relevant responses, mindful language, and a caring attitude should be the cornerstones of customer engagement with your brand. You can also initiate important conversations on your blog, update your FAQ section, provide new information, and offer a richer experience on your website.

Keep Track of Trends: Topical posts, memes on topics of current interest, posts or shorts by influencers, polls, and incentives are a great idea to stay with current happenings and trends on social media. These can be connected authentically to your brand and should be relevant to your target audience for the best outcomes.

Featured image provided by Ketut Subiyanto; Pexels; Thanks!