Are businesses using social media to its full potential?
If you want your business to be successful on social media, you need to have a well-documented social media marketing strategy. Posting random content every once in a while is not enough.
If you don’t have a clear social media plan and well-set workflow, you might not see any results from your social media marketing efforts.
If you take the time to do it right, you can easily achieve your goals. In this article, we will show you how to create a social media plan.
What Is a Social Media Plan?
A social media strategy is a plan for what you want to do and achieve on social media. A well-thought-out social media strategy can be very beneficial for your business. The more specific and detailed your plan is, the better your performance will be.
If you have strong social media presence, it will increase your brand awareness, get you more customers, make your social proof visible, and make your company more credible. This will make you a more professional organization and improve your position in the market.
After learning the answer to the question “what is a social media plan?,” let’s take a look at some useful statistics. Then we’ll share our ultimate guide to planning a social media campaign.
The Importance of Social Media for Businesses
This is no longer the case where businesses are using social media for fun. Nothing provides better proof than numbers and statistics, so let’s see what this year is telling us in terms of social media and its importance:
- 55% of the World’s population are users of social media.
- As of October 2021, Facebook is the most widely used social media platform, with 2.89 billion people using it monthly.
- On average, people spend about 2h 27 mins per day on social media.
- 93,33% of Internet users are on social media.
As you can see, social media platforms have a lot of potentials that companies should want to invest in to grow their businesses. So without further ado, let’s see how to make a social media plan.
How to Create a Social Media Plan
To save time, let’s get straight to the point and reveal the components of an effective social media plan. Once you understand how to make a social media plan that will work, you will be well on your way to meeting your goals.
Define Your Starting Point
Before creating a social media marketing plan, take a close look at your own social media profiles and those of your competitors. This will help you identify what strategies are effective and which ones need to be improved. Here is what we recommend before you start planning a social media campaign:
- Prepare a SWOT analysis to determine the strengths and weaknesses of your business as well as the opportunities and threats it faces from the external business environment.
- Conduct a PESTEL analysis to explore and understand where you and your company stand politically, economically, socially, technologically, environmentally, and legally.
- Research your competitors as well as your industry and find out how your business can stand out from them to be unique.
- Conduct a social media audit to check how, where, and with what results you have been communicating up until now – this will allow you to assess growth, opportunities, and anything that can be done to improve your social presence.
Specify Your Target Group
Creating content that your target group likes, comments on, and shares is crucial to a successful social media marketing plan. To do this, you need to understand your audience. Luckily, there are a few ways to get to know your audience. One way is to look at their demographics.
- First, check out who your content resonates the most with and see whether this group matches the ideal audience for your brand – with qualified leads you will convert your audience to customers in no time.
- Get familiar with relevant surveys, reports, and statistics to gain more insights.
- Come up with a few personas to represent that ideal audience. This will basically be a detailed description of specific people, with real wants and needs, who you want to turn into your fans and followers. Knowing your average follower’s persona will allow you to adjust your social media campaigns according to your real audience’s expectations.
Analyze Your Competitors on Social Media
It is important to understand your competition when creating an effective social media strategy. Find out what kind of content they are publishing, what tone they are using, and how often they are posting.
It would be beneficial for you to spend some time observing your competition and understanding what areas you could improve upon. In addition, by analyzing their metrics such as reach and engagement, you will be able to get an idea of how tough the competition is and if there is room for you to enter the market.
Use that information to improve your strategy.
Set the Objectives
Well-structured social media campaigns can be achieved by setting specific and measurable goals. Doing this allows you to track your progress and optimize your strategy over time. See the difference for yourself:
I will increase the number of people who follow me on Facebook.
I will increase the average engagement rate on my Facebook profile by 2% by the end of the year.
There is a very useful objective planning model called SMART that will help you design your objectives when it comes to planning a social media campaign. According to this model, your objectives should be:
- Specific – sensible, significant, and simple
- Measurable – meaningful and motivating
- Achievable – agreed and attainable
- Relevant – reasonable, realistic, results-based, and resource
- Time-bound – time-based, time-limited, and time/cost limited
To make it all work, you should:
- Establish your expectations and specific goals derived from a social media marketing plan. What would you like to achieve through your social media presence? Do these goals line up with the overall marketing strategy for your brand?
- Set relevant social media KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that should accompany your social media marketing strategy at all times.
- Make sure you will be able to achieve those objectives.
Marketing, Customer Service, and More
If your business lacks a social media presence, you could be missing out on many potential benefits for your brand. Social media provides opportunities to gain new customers and to build relationships with existing ones. Additionally, social media is a low-cost way to reach your target audience and learn more about your brand.
According to Abdul Muhammad, who is the chief digital officer and partner at RBB Communications, social media provides a unique combination of targeting ability, wide reach, and low cost when compared to most other marketing channels. He believes that brands must meet people where they already are spending a majority of their time, which is why a social media presence is so important.
We’ll discuss how businesses can make the most effective use of social media, the best practices for creating an effective social media marketing strategy, how to measure the ROI of social media, and how to select the best social platform for your brand.
How to Use Social Media for Business
These are some of the aspects of business that can benefit from a social media presence:
- Marketing
- Customer service
- Sales
- Recruiting and hiring
- Crisis management
Use Social Media for Marketing
When you incorporate an effective social media presence into your small business marketing plan, you can reach customers and prospects where they are. Here are some tips and best practices for creating a successful presence on social media to market your brand:
- Craft a social media marketing strategy. The best way to ensure success on social media is to go in with a plan. This means devising a social media marketing strategy that includes each platform you plan to use.
- Post consistently. Your followers value a steady presence, so follow a consistent posting schedule. While being consistent, avoid posting too much, which can be off-putting for your followers.
- Develop a clear voice. Create a consistent voice and tone in your social media presence – one that resonates with your audience and influences how they see your brand. Listen to your audience and find ways to relate to them without looking like you’re trying too hard. Most importantly, don’t be afraid to show a little personality. This helps present your business as adaptive, friendly, and relevant.
- Have fun with social media. Provide fun ways to generate more leads and engage with your customers, like running social media contests, linking to your website or special offers in your profile bio, and hosting live videos with exciting updates or news.
- Know your audience. Use your analytics tools to see demographic information, customer behavior, and social media trends to inform your content. Knowing what your audience wants to see from you and responding accordingly can go a long way toward boosting your engagement rates.
Use Social Media for Customer Service
Because so many customers already communicate through social media, it makes sense to use social media for customer service. By communicating with customers through social media, you can address their problems quickly and efficiently, which can help create a loyal customer base.
- Respond to customer issues quickly. Many businesses approach social media as another channel for self-promotion and don’t always respond when customers comment on their posts or tweet at them. According to research from Convince & Convert, 42% of consumers expect a response to a complaint on social media within 60 minutes, and nearly one-third expect a response within half an hour. Monitoring social media channels and responding to concerns promptly can help you build strong relationships with customers.
- Use hashtags strategically. How hashtags operate within a social media platform’s algorithm is likely to change frequently, so stay updated on your social platforms’ hashtag recommendations and best practices. Hashtags help keep topics organized and easy to navigate, especially on platforms like Twitter. You can also add more information and curate content to your hashtags.
- Take public conversations private. Many angry or frustrated customers leave public comments on a brand’s Instagram and Facebook accounts or tweet at a business. While you shouldn’t ignore these messages, it’s not always wise to handle the entire encounter publicly. Show other customers that you value their input and time by sending an initial response requesting to continue the conversation privately.
Use Social Media for Sales
One of the most direct and lucrative ways to experience the power of social media is through increased sales. You can boost sales on social media in various ways:
- Advertise on social media. The major social platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, have advertising platforms that help you reach your target audience and monitor your ad campaigns.
- Sell on social media. Facebook and Instagram offer sales platforms and shoppable posts that make it easy for businesses to start selling online.
- Work with brand ambassadors. Finding social media influencers or enthusiastic customers to act as brand ambassadors is an effective way to boost word-of-mouth buzz about your business and boost sales.
- Improve your business with social listening. Social listening is a process in which organizations take a macro view of what customers are saying online about the brand and use the information to improve the business. Social listening provides a broader view of industry trends and customer sentiment that may directly or indirectly impact a brand and its sales.