Social Media Strategy

With the evolution of social media marketing, it is now mandatory to have an online presence. The days of forced TV commercials are already over. People even read news online and follow their interests through RSS feed. Specially for startups, traditional promotions are too expensive to spend money on. Lets see what are the important aspects of Social Media Marketing Strategy.

1. Know your target audience
The first step of any marketing initiative is to know your target audience. The demographic information about your customer segment will help you not only choosing the right social media channel but also creating meaningful contents. For example, if you are into B2B business then the channels like LinkedIn and SlideShare are something you should focus on. But if you are in the business of women appearals, then channels like pinterest and instagram are more suitable for your campaigns.

2. Content is king
Unlike traditional media, contents on social media may go viral and it may impact your business in both positive as well as negative sense. With little research, you can know what keeps your target audience engaged. What kind of contents generate more retweets, shares and likes. See the facebook walls of your target audience, examine what they like to share and retweet and what Youtube videos have maximum no of views with positive comments. What blogs are popular in your target customer segment.

3. Manage you social media
An average american spends 40 minutes per day on facebook and 10 minutes on LinkedIn. In order to make you post visible to your target audience, you must know what time of the day, they are most active on facebook. Please do consider the differences in timezone. While a user may be active on facebook in the evening, the same use may be active on LinkedIn during office hours. For some users social media is the best time pass during commuting to work in public transport. Keeping track of all the social media may tricky and unmanageable for startups.

Fortunately, there are plenty of tools so you can update and monitor all of your accounts in one convenient location. Some of the greatest tools are HootSuite, rFactr, Sprout Social and Bitly. You can choose the tool that meet your needs for example rFact is better in B2B.

4. Keep an eye on Analytics
To market successfully on internet, you must define and measure your activities on social media. While most of the social media platforms provide their own analytics, social media management tools provide you consolidated view and you can instantly know the penetrations and success of your posts. You can truly measure the ROI and your ad spend on social media.
5. Keep a watch on competitive landscape and comments from users
One of the most important activity of social marketing is that you need to respond quickly to the comments and critics and take action. Startups can not afford negative publicity done by competitors or irritated consumers.
If you don’t have a social media strategy then you don’t have a detailed marketing strategy and you might be leaving money on the table. The only way to build a solid social marketing strategy is through experiments. You might have to experiment with contents, media type, posting schedule and choice of platform for initial few weeks or months before you can make a solid strategy.