An Effective Social Media Strategy

For our next article, we would like to talk about social media.  More specifically your content for social media.  We are going to share some data about how an effective social media strategy will give your business a lot of attention. 

Planning is Everything to Post Consistently

We suggest our customers have a content calendar as a general plan to guide their topics.  You can start by listing down the major holidays.  If you’re a retail business you might be doing this already by way of a promotional calendar.  If you have that already, then a lot of your work is done and all you have to do is make sure your content strategy coincides with promotions.  Once you have the major holidays listed down, you can look for national days or annual events that coincide with your business or connect with your customers.  For the weeks and days there are no events (which is the majority of the year), you use filler content.

What Type of Content to Post On Social Media

Let’s talk about content.  Good effective content is always key.  You want to make sure you post content that is relevant to your base, that goes for sharing content too.  When you share content you have to make sure it applies to your industry, you wouldn’t necessarily share a post you would share to your personal channel.  The content you create directly targets your base and this is the content you try to capture the most amount of engagement.  You can do this by asking for feedback in your post or ending the post in a question.  Posts with higher comments gain more visibility in news feeds. 

So what is the formula for good content?  Well, that really depends on how your audience engages with your content or your shares.  By doing this regularly you will start to get a sense of what your audience will react to.  Let’s call that your general following.  For an effective strategy, you need to make sure you are also targeting audiences that are outside your general following that may have interests but might not fit entirely in your base to bring in new customers or test new ideas.  The majority of your content or shares should be toward your general following, let’s say 8 out of 10 posts.  The other 2 posts should be a little riskier, meaning your discussing topics that may get a good reaction or no reaction at all.  That’s why the riskier posts are the few.  They might be of some new idea or new concept that you never knew your base is attracted to.

The Value of Your Social Media Content

What kind of value do your posts give to your audience?  Are they funny?  Are they cool informative?  Or, are you just stating facts about what you do or ask them to buy from you every chance you get?  The latter gets old fast and really doesn’t give value to your general audience at all.  In fact, you might start to lose your audience if you continue that.  So, think about creating content or sharing content that relates to your industry that might impact them.  Maybe an empowering quote, a technology piece on how the world will change in the next few years, use current events to help you.  There’s a wealth in good content all around.  If you keep up the value, then every now and again you can ask your base to buy once your posts in your engagement levels spike.

Value Driven Social Media Content Wins the Race

We have been managing the account below for about a month now by using all the social media strategies above.  You can see that we have dramatically increased their presence.  But the most important metric is how well our engagement performs compared to the overall post reach.  If you need help with your social media strategy, feel free to drop us a line.