With a plethora of social platforms today that customers are on today, you need to make sure that your brand is visible to the right people at the right time. We generally have a checklist for our clients to tick off when we handle their soc-med marketing.
1. Where on social media to advertise:
First, define who you are selling to – B2B or B2C. Based on that, you can shortlist the social media channels you need to be on! While LinkedIn is the best for B2B advertising, Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp for business cater to a mix of both and Instagram, SnapChat and the like are best for purely B2C communication.
2. Research
There are two dimensions for research on social media.One, check out accounts that are doing a great marketing job on social media channels. Try and get a sense of what kind of content they share, and how they engage with their customers.
Two, shortlist your closest competition and see what their social media strategy is. If you don’t have the time to do that, or are not sure how to go about it, check out this [awesome competition analysis service]
3. Creating accounts on the platform(s)
Once you know what channels you are going to advertise on, you need to create your account with the channels. Typically, you would dedicate a person to manage the page, but if you don’t have the resources, or the expertise, it would be best to talk to an agency at this point to kick-start your soc-med adventure.
4. Account Branding
When you start the process of creating an account, you realize that there is some basic branding that you need to do for each of your pages. An eye-catching profile picture, a brief yet descriptive story about what you do, customizations across the page are all elements that you need to keep ready for this phase.
5. How to advertise on each channel
How content is viewed, shared and consumed on each channel is different. Learn the rules and dimensions required for advertising on social media. You can find a quick reference [chart here].
6. ‘Content’ and what goes into each post
You first need to be very clear that running a business page on social media is different from a personal page. Writing a post on your wall, or putting up an Insta story on your profile won’t take you too much time.
For your business page, you need to pick your tone. Conversational works best, since people like to know there’s a human and not a bot behind your account. Then, you should ensure that your designs or photos you are using are high quality, appealing and bear your branding.
7. Schedules and posting
There’s simple math behind when to post on social media channels. When your followers are most active, whether there’s a trend you should adopt and your frequency of posting – these are all factors that you should consider.
In fact, we always create a planner for the coming month for our clients’ social media accounts and schedule all the content that we can to minimize last-minute efforts. But, we also ensure we are constantly on social media monitoring trends and questions that comes up. This way, you stay constant, but flexible as well.
8. Community Management & Engagement
It doesn’t help to keep talking at people, you need to stop and listen to what they are saying as well. And start a conversation with them. That’s how you make relationships that really last.
Having a community engagement manager is a good investment for your company and brand. This will be the person who speaks to your customers on a daily basis, understands the issues they face, constantly comes up with new ways to firefight problems and generally, is the one that the people look out for!
9. Analysis
Analyze your performance on different social media channels every month. Understand what content has done well, what trends have got you the most engagement, when your followers spiked. Simply put, make sure that you do more of what has clearly worked for you and less of what doesn’t get much traction. This way, you optimize your social media marketing effort and maximize returns.
10. Consulting and Training
A good agency should be able to hand-hold as you navigate the treacherous waters of social media for your business. You should have monthly sessions on what’s in and what’s out, as well as training for the relevant members of your staff who provide the content for your channels.
Get Started!
If you want to launch your social media channels, or run an attractive campaign that will have people talking about your brand, get in touch with our social media team today!
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