Social Media Success Strategy and Best Practices
Strategy, Strategy, Strategy
You should know by now that in marketing, a strategy is everything. You will waste countless hours without a completed thought process and in this business; time is money. When my clients talk candidly with me, they express that they find social media completely overwhelming. They see their competitors participating in the conversation and know they need to be there but they don’t know how to manage it and end up putting it on the marketing backburner. Your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and Pinterest pages are the public face of your business. You need to treat them as so. Don’t look at them as an afterthought. Your social media needs as much strategy and planning as your other forms of advertising.
During the last few months of 2015, SIX created a series of educational tracks to help small businesses learn about social media as well as traditional and digital advertising. For marketing executives, education is half the battle. Helping our clients to learn the ins and outs of what we do ultimately leads to better work, a better relationship and a more cohesive brand strategy for you. During the social media presentations specifically, our audiences were shocked at how many tools we use, how many average dollars are spent on social advertising ($24 billion annually) and how much work it takes to manage just one brand.
Editorial Calendar Power
“In walks the editorial calendar, all smug and drunk with power. You might dislike him at first, but he has the organization, style, and planning abilities to back up his ego.” A line from the book I’ve been dying to write. Planning is the most in-depth phase of marketing and one of the most important. Without it, each effort would cease to be timely, and would stand on it’s own straining to connect with others to reach your business goals.
Editorial planning can help you:
Save Time
When you’re rushed, there’s no time for strategy research let alone optimized wording, imagery or hashtags which waste time and effort that ends with no ROI. Great content doesn’t come from a rushed mind either. Social media management takes time, time that most busy people don’t have during the day. Planning your topics, posts, hashtags, goals and more means getting it down in advance. Now, you won’t need to take the time to think of a post or a quippy line in a rush at 4pm on a Tuesday.
Avoid Missed Opportunities
Holidays and events that happen annually tend to creep up on us. If you’re planning your content in advance, it ensures that you don’t miss an important content opportunity. This also allows for you to plan promotions ahead of time. No last minute thinking allowed!
Avoid Bland Content Overload
Planning means organizing your thoughts properly. After an audit of your accounts, take the time to discover what content your target audience really engages with. Once you’ve done this you can create a list of interesting topics (i.e. industry-related funny memes, new job offerings, new and awesome products) that benefit you that your consumer will love. Creating a list of topics helps you make sure you’re content is consistently diverse. It leaves no room to overload your loyal followers with the same type of content over and over again.
Schedule in Advance
With certain social media tools like Hootsuite or Hubspot, you can schedule your content to release on a certain time/day. So when Social Media Specialist Suzie gets the flu in February, your social media doesn’t lay dormant and collect dust. Your editorial calendar should be clear, to the point and easy to understand so that anyone might pick it up and be able to execute its tasks.
Here is a sample editorial calendar from our client work:
Hubspot's example is a somewhat abbreviated version of what you should use, but it gives you an idea of how to start or you can always contact me anytime with questions. They save you time, money and resources. Safe to say, editorial calendars rock! Start your 2016 social media presence off the right way.
If you want to see how SIX does it, check out our marketing packages below.
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