A social media marketing strategy is a summary of everything you plan to do and hope to achieve on social media. It guides your actions and lets you know whether you’re succeeding or failing. Here are 8 tips to help you set up your own Social Media Strategy!

Cast a wide net
A social media strategy shouldn’t be “owned” by anyone. Social impacts the whole organisation and should be everywhere, rather than in one place. In other words: create a cross-functional team.

Listen & Compare
It’s the oldest one in the book, but “listen” is still a good advice. Your customers/clients – and, truth be told, your competition – will give you a good guide on how you should be active on social media. So: broaden your social listening to beyond your brand name.

What’s it for?
Social media can be used to get different business objectives. But the best social media strategies have (at least in the beginning) a focus. What do you want to use social media for? Awareness? Sales? Loyalty? Retention? Pick one.

Select success metrics
How are you going to determine whether your social media is making a difference for your business? What key measures will you use to evaluate the social media strategy? Hopefully you will transcend likes and engagement? Will you measure return on investment?

Who’s watching?
With whom will you be interacting on social media? There could be demographic and psychographic characteristics of your current or potential clients… How will this impact what you can do or should attempt on social media?

What’s your thing?
It doesn’t matter who you are or what you sell, a product on it’s own is not enough to create a passion-worthy stir… How will you appeal to the hearts of your audience. Disney is not about movies, it’s about magic. Apple is about innovation… What are you about?

Be human
On social media you compete for attention against a person’s friends and family members, so at least to some degree your company needs to act like a human being, not an entity.

Create a channel plan
Only after you’ve figured out why you’re active and how you will measure success, you should ask yourself the question of “How?”. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the rest… Create a channel plan in which you have a specific reason to be active on each platform.

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