The ever-growing marketplace of social media has kept the strategist in disarray. The algorithm, traffic generation methods, tips to utilizing the platforms’ full potential, and many other things have been in constant flux. But creating social media content should never be so painful. Actually, for people who understand social media platforms, it is a simple task. All they need to do is bring all the important things in line.
There are so many businesses that go live on social media every day. Some of them understand the social media ecosystem well, but most fail to get the hang of it. One of the common mistakes that small business owners make is handing over their social accounts to juniors. And here is when things start to get off-track.
Here are some important factors that should be kept in mind while designing your strategy.
1. Goal selections
A significant problem faced by many small businesses year after year is their unrealistic goals. To have a successful social media marketing strategy in 2022, you should first consider selecting your goals. One of the best tricks that many strategists adopt is the use of SMART.
S for Smart.
M for Measurable.
A for Attainable.
R for Relevant.
T for Time-bound.
All these letters and their words are self-explanatory, and one should always consider taking these five steps. You can brainstorm and weave your strategy around this. All these five elements are a part of the social media marketing ecosystem.
2. Determine the relevant metric
Different types of social media platforms have different types of analytics. Most small business strategists fail to follow this rule. Most businesses create their social media accounts and spend effort, time, and resources to build their presence. But they forget to first create relevant metrics. Therefore, before doing any research or investing anything in social media platforms, it is better to determine the metric relevant to your business.
3. Why do you need a social presence?
One of the most pertinent questions that a business should ask while creating a social media strategy is why they want this presence? Is it just because everyone else is doing it? Or do you want better traffic? So, ask yourself this question first up. There are different kinds of people on social platforms: some want to promote their products, others drive traffic, while some simply want to serve their customers. But this needs to be done based on what type of social media content you publish.
So when you ask yourself this question, base it on some parameters. Talking in general, here are a few social media goals you can have for your small business in 2022:
- Is your presence going to be for increasing your brand’s awareness?
- Is it just to drive traffic towards your website?
- Is it going to help in new lead generation?
- Will it help in growing the revenue of your business?
- Is it going to boost brand engagement?
- Will it help build a community around the business?
- Is it going to provide any social customer service?
Define your social media presence on parameters just like these.
4. Define your target audience
Once you have figured out the above three things, then the next is – who? This means you need to see which community is relevant for your business. You need to target that audience first. Determining the target audience is of utmost importance because only then will you be able to make your next move. All your visual, audio, and readable content should be in line with the target audience. Also, once you define your target audience, it becomes easier for you to strategize things better.
But if you offer a product or service relevant to more than one community or category of people, the goals will have to be defined accordingly.
If you want to know your target audience, then here are a few questions that you will have to answer.
- Who are they in terms of gender, location, age, and so on?
- Why should they be interested in your product?
- How will your product help them?
- Is it going to provide them with a solution or a medium (if at all it provides one)
- Who will consume your content, and what type of social media platform they usually are on.
5. What and when are you going to share
After defining all the above things and answering all the above questions, there will be a few points that you might still have to think about. The first thing is, what are you going to share? This means the type of content. This should ideally be followed by when you are going to share your posts.
A lot of research has shown that these two things are key to a successful social media presence. Even if you take a look at your analytics of any social media platform, you will see the engagement of every content you post. After carefully analyzing the posts, you can decide which is the best time to publish your content. This is important because if you publish when most of your followers are online, the response to your content would be better.
Conclusion
Social media platforms have a huge user base with millions and billions of active people. Each day millions of posts get published, so if you integrate all the above things in your strategy, you are likely to get more responses from different platforms.
