Partner Article

5 key points to consider when developing your social strategy

It’s often tempting to want to dive right into a your social media strategy, you want to get every possible network profile up and running right away, you want your logo in situ on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr … Stop.

There are things to consider first before you get started with all of this, otherwise all you’ll be left with is 20+ empty social profiles, something you don’t want any user to have to face, writes durhamlane marketing executive David Todd.

1. Your Audience

Above all else you need to consider who you will be targeting, if your demographic is company directors in the aviation industry it is unlikely that you would find them in the teen-filled blogging site Tumblr, if your aiming to gain a following of 18-22 year old fashion students I’m doubtful you will find them all on the business-driven world of LinkedIn.

Make sure when you start your social media planning do some research to find which networks you will most likely find your key demographics and concentrate on them, don’t overstretch your resources casting your net too wide.

2. Your Content

Be mindful that your social networks will not tend to themselves, it is vital that you are continually pushing out new and interesting content. Content can be in any form, blog posts, images, videos, audio files, anything you can share online in-fact.

The wider the range of content the better, if you can post a video of something interesting within your business you will build an audience of people searching for similar videos, if that then links to some article you’ve written which they find interesting you may have a very valuable follower indeed, keep them coming!

3. Your Place

Consider where you are, the increase of geotagging trends in the past few years has lent to huge shift in the way local businesses are utilising social media, an independent coffee shop on a town’s high street can more readily tweet about the happenings of the region that a larger conglomerate with a head office elsewhere.

It’s of great importance to using your locations to your advantage, have a different social profile for each branch and assign an individual within each location to perform regular updates, tweet location tagged pictures, we as people love familiarity and this is why location based social networks can engage so much more effectively.

4. Your Goals

Always be mindful of your aims and objectives for your social strategy, there is no need to keep pushing product launches if all you are trying to do is build a social following. Keep your tone conversational and engaging until you have built a good following, now id the time to shift your online marketing goals, bring in mentions of your products and services gradually until your followers start responding and sharing.

If you can create an engaged following which actively share your content to their networks you will go viral.

5. You

Lastly, something of great importance; you need to factor in your time, the content creator, the social honcho. The biggest mistake made by most companies in their marketing strategy is spreading themselves too thinly, leaving networks stale for months at a time, leaving some entirely blank, no user is ever going to want to share content which is months old, however appealing.

If you don’t have the time or the resources to execute your social media strategy make sure you find other provisions whether it be hiring someone in to help keep up with your social media streams or, more suitably for most SMEs, outsourcing, always choose a company who knows the importance of commercial and adaptive copywriting.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by durhamlane .