A new year means a new social media strategy. Planning is essential!
As we head into the second month of 2015 and you are slowly getting settled back into the daily routines, it is the perfect time to start planning your year ahead! In particular, the game plan for your social media. You can’t afford to ‘wing it’ as your competitors will be planning their social media strategies for the year also.
Sounds daunting? Fear not, below are some pointers that I have put together on how to establish the best social media strategy for your business in 2015.
Time to start planning
People spend a considerable amount of time on social media interacting not only with family and friends but also with businesses and brands. Social media helps to successfully generate loyal customers and provides a platform to engage with both current and potential customers.
Firstly you need to determine which social media channels work best for your business. Facebook and Twitter are the best platforms to use to reach large numbers of consumers with updates, offers, new products and services. They also allow you to engage with one-on-one followers if they have any queries. LinkedIn is a great platform for generating more business as it is the largest professional network. It helps to establish both your colleagues and employees as experts and leaders in your industry. LinkedIn also allows you to share and participate in LinkedIn groups and is a great resource for employment.
Once you have established which channels are best suited to your business, the next step is to develop an editorial calendar so you can plan your posts - I recommend planning a monthly schedule and then you can make changes if required week by week . It is important to remain ‘active’ on the page once you have set it up as customers expect to see weekly updates and offers. By mapping out a plan it will help to avoid unplanned posts and allows you to pre-plan ‘boosted’ posts. Enticing images and videos are also an essential part of the planning as visuals generate more views and increase the chance of customers getting in contact with you - which brings me to the next point...
You must set up a process for monitoring your business page so that you can answer people's questions and comments quickly. I would recommend checking your channels on a daily basis. It may only take a few minutes depending on how active your followers have been on your page, but it is well worth it as you don’t want to lose customers through lack of follow-up and make them turn to your competitors for answers.
Tracking your channels on a monthly basis is vital to the success of your business. It will show you which channel is performing the best, where you need to make changes and which special offer or competition is the most/least successful. Evaluating the return on investment is also very important as it will show if all your hard work has paid off with an increase in sales.
Finally, your website is the central component to your social media strategy, it is how your customers can connect with you and find out more about your business, so be sure to share your social media channels on your website.
I hope my pointers have given you some confidence to kick start your social media plan for the year. Remember that it isn't as scary as it seems and I am here to help if you have any queries or would like me to sit down with you and help you develop a social media strategy for your business.
