What Is a Social Media Strategy and How It Can Help Your Business

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If you are a business owner or manager, you probably know what a marketing strategy is and why it is important for your business to have a solid marketing plan to support its growth.

A social media strategy should be part of your bigger marketing plan. Ten or 20 years ago, nobody cared about social media, for the simple reason that it did not exist. However, the past few years brought a tremendous technological progress that led to a real explosion of social media channels and interactions.

Everybody and their dog, or cat for that matter, are now on Facebook. Many of them also have an Instagram, Twitter, Google Plus or Pinterest account.

woman-dog

Emergence of Social Media 

This rise in popularity of social media channels can be explained by the thirst for interaction that humans have. We love to stay in touch with our loved ones, we love to share cool things and deep thoughts with our peers, and we feel motivated to build our online presence to speak volumes about who we are and what we believe in.

A social media account is just like a virtual home where we welcome guests from all over the planet. Sharing has never reached such levels in the past. Its popularity makes it a must for every business to be there, just where the clients are. However, if you want to make the most out of your interaction efforts, you need to develop a social media strategy and then stick to it.

Your messages are going to be stronger if they are coherent and in line with the vision and the mission of your company. This can be done only if you think and prepare everything carefully. You can’t just be spontaneous in your communication and hope things are going to converge all in the same direction.

Such focus can only be achieved by developing a good strategy to guide you in your social media interactions.

Why Strategy is Everything 

By making the strategy a priority, you are also going to gain a lot of time. It’s much easier to implement something well-thought from before rather than think about everything you have to do, every single moment. Having a strategy allows you to focus solely on the execution, thus enabling you to be more efficient.

To give you only one example, if you want to keep in touch with your Facebook followers, you can prepare and upload all messages for the week to come, and then schedule them to get published at the exact date and time you want. You work once, and then the social network is going to work for you, publishing all those posts according to your schedule.

You only need to follow up with the comments and reply to messages received from your followers. This takes way less time than thinking three times a day what to post next and what image to choose to grab the attention of your audience better.

phone-man

A good social media strategy won’t probably bring you a lot of sales. However, it will bring you something else, as important as the sales. It will bring you recognition and brand awareness. It will bring you a loyal audience.

All these people who subscribe to receive your messages are your best possible leads. They are already happy to communicate with you. The connection is already established. This makes it very easy to show them later on what needs you can fulfill for them.

Keep Your Eyes Open 

Whenever you spot an opportunity, you can turn it into a need and then supply the right solution. Most people are going to appreciate your help. This means they are going to buy whatever you may be selling to them. Once you’ve got them to listen to what you have to say, you can help them realize your products and services could make their life easier one way of another.

Social media is the right environment for this because it is based on interaction. People expect everyone else to interact with them, so they aren’t going to be mad when they see messages from a company they don’t know very well yet. They are more permissive, so you should take advantage of this and show them how you can be of help.

gifts

Don’t always expect something in return, but make sure you get your return on investment (ROI), too. If you organize a contest with nice giveaways, make sure you ask your participants to provide you something in exchange for your effort. This “something” could be a “like” or a “share”, an email address or a phone number.

It is up to you to decide what information would serve your purpose better and ask your followers to give it to you.

Final Thoughts

All these activities need to lead to the same end objective. That’s why you must have a strategy instead of doing anything that crosses your mind at any given time. Focused messages are easier to remember, so you are going to work less for the same impact on the mind of your potential consumers.

Work smart and the results are going to be here for you sooner rather than later. Besides, a real strategy with goals and tactics allows you to measure your accomplishments. At the end of the day, you are going to know what activities brought you the greatest ROI so that you can organize more of them in the future.

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