My Top 5 Tips to Create Your Social Media Strategy

From Fanny Christelle Mekoh, Speaker and Marketing Strategist, Belles Creatives

Guest post by: Fanny Christelle Mekoh

Whether you’re a new entrepreneur or been doing this for a while, it’s a new year and the perfect opportunity to lay down how you want to organize your online presence.

As an entrepreneur, having an online presence is key for many reasons. In order to be successful online, it’s important to define your strategy (where, how, when and why you’re online). This strategy will help you raise awareness and grow your business.

Keep in mind that success doesn’t happen overnight. In fact, you need to be consistent and implement the following 5 tips to create your social media strategy.

First thing is to write down why you need a social media presence. What is it that you’re trying to achieve? Is your business product or service based? How will this elevate your business? Who are you targeting? Keep it simple, determine up to three goals to start. Having an online presence can help you: increase your brand awareness, increase your website traffic, control your reputation management, establish your brand personality, develop targeted advertisement or simply stay on top of your competition.

Make sure your goals are S.M.A.R.T.: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and timely. It will be so much easier to monitor your progress as you go.

1. Define your goals

Once you have your S.M.A.R.T. goals, you need to identify where you need an online presence. Here are some platforms to consider:

Facebook:

Facebook is the most popular social network in the world with more than two billion users. As a result, you can find just about anyone on Facebook, provided they have access to the Internet. That means almost everyone in your customer base has a Facebook account, which is why it's a top social media site for businesses. You can easily create an online store, do live presentation to engage with your audience or create a group to communicate with supporters.

2. Identify your platforms

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Instagram:

Instagram is the perfect social network for brands or companies that target young, hip demographics. Photos and videos do exceptionally well on Instagram, and you now have the option of doing online sales. There’re also tons of ways to engage with your audience and integrate user generated content.

LinkedIn:

LinkedIn is a thriving community of workers and business owners who share and connect on a professional level, making it much more formal than other social media platforms. Because of that, its users tend to respond better to B2B content than B2C. It’s also the perfect platform to recruit talent or build your network.

Twitter:

Twitter gives its users a steady stream of information and new content from all over the Internet. It has millions of engaged users every day, and practically every brand in the world has an account to update its customers. It may not have the same broad audience as Facebook, but it’s easily one of the most accessible networks on the planet.

TikTok:

TikTok is a relatively new hit platform where users create and share short videos. TikTok was once used mostly by Generation Z but has now gained lots of popularity and can be great for a business if used properly. If you want to create a TikTok account, make sure you have a keen understanding of your brand and how that translates to TikTok specifically. Look at how other businesses are tackling it before you try it yourself. It’s ideal to share fun and creative videos.

Pinterest:

Pinterest is a place to share (or “pin”) different visual content so that other people can see it. That can include everything from a cooking recipe to gardening, which means practically any company can find at least part of their niche on this social network. It’s one of the best social media platforms to grow your audience, drive traffic to your website and, promote new content you create, especially if you regularly maintain boards.

Youtube:

Youtube is great for product reviews, instructional videos, and similar kinds of content do exceptionally well on YouTube, especially when you’re educating part of your target market. Plus, once you make a video, it’ll start to show up in Google and YouTube search results, and you can promote it on your other social accounts.

3. Determine your brand voice

Having a business online also means having a brand identity and brand voice. Your brand personality doesn’t have to be the same on all platforms since they serve a specific purpose. For example, your content on Twitter can be newsworthy versus being light and fun on TikTok.

4. Manage your posts

Keep in mind that social media is about being social. Connect with your audience. Engage and always include a call to action. Always remember to answer comments and direct messages.

Social media can be overwhelming and time consuming so consider content batching to maximize time. There are many tools available to manage your content such as Hootsuite, Later, Buffer and Tailwind. Facebook also has a great tool to manage all your Instagram and Facebook content. In fact each social media platform allows you to track your data, to determine your posting schedule to maintain a cohesive feed.

Don’t forget to take time to research your hashtags. They will help you reach a broader audience if used right.

The next thing you need to focus on is your content. They say content is KING. And it’s true. Your content will help you grow your community. Try not to make it all about sales but also create content to educate your audience.

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5. Evaluate your goals

Consistency is key in the long term to grow. If you are just starting out, try posting daily and track your metrics to know which content performs best and what is the best time to post. If you’ve been online for a while you can post every two days since the algorithm allows people to see your content sometimes two days after it was posted.

In recap, it’s critical to create your S.M.A.R.T. goals then identify your persona, choose the platform where to invest your time and how you will reach your audience. Remember: be you! There’s only one you and that’s your super power.