Guide: Building a successful social media strategy
Creating a successful social media strategy should be easy. You tweet, share photos on Instagram and update the status on Facebook. Most of us are regular users of these tools in our privacy.
Therefore, many people believe that it takes just a few minutes of work per day to create a successful social media strategy.
It’s not that simple, unfortunately. If you want to increase awareness of your brand, you need more than a few posts per day. Social media is more than just a marketing tool.
These can be used in many different areas: customer service, sales, market research and recruitment.
The presence on social media therefore lays the foundation for all these activities. In this guide we give you our best tips for creating a successful and successful strategy for your social media.
Contents
Identify relevant departments
For starters, we have mapped a table for the departments where social media is central. One reason why a social media strategy can be complicated is because these overlap many departments – not just the marketing and communications department.
A social media strategy should be based on your marketing and communication work, but in order to succeed, your social media strategy must also be integrated into other departments.
Get started with your social media strategy
To get started with building your social media strategy, there are three important questions you should ask yourself:
1. Social media is basically about building relationships with others. What kind of relationships does your company want to build and what is the purpose of being in social media?
2. What are your long-term goals in the company, your culture and your DNA? List your goals and how your social media strategy can help achieve those goals.
3. Where is your target group? Do not put unnecessary work on social channels where your target audience is not, but meet them where they are present.
Many companies’ social media strategy is about appearing and spreading their message to anyone who wants to listen. Instead, you should put your audience in the first room. Use customer demographics to identify which platforms they use and tailor content based on them.
Create a social media team
Initially, it is enough for a person to work with the implementation of your social media strategy. However, as the social presence increases, you should put in an extra gear to succeed.
Your social media strategy must be integrated and implemented throughout the organization. Even if you do not have the opportunity to hire more people directly, it can be good to create an overview of the roles needed to achieve your goals. In the picture below we give examples of roles that can be important in the work.
When it’s time to hire you should avoid stereotypes – the millennial generation is inhaling social media, but that is not necessarily enough. Look for someone with high ambitions, perhaps with previous experience, who is creative and determined and above all good at building relationships. Read our blog post “Succeeding in your job as a social media manager” to learn more about what tasks a social media manager must manage within a social media strategy.
Standardize and optimize work
Now it’s time to move from planning to execution. It is important to be consistent in your social media strategies.
You should therefore standardize variables such as languages, partners, platforms and protocols. Also decide which way you want to be involved in the social dialogue.
Also, make sure to use images and colors that are representative of your brand. In other words, make your way of communication personal for your brand and make sure that you are always consistent and clear in your social media strategies.
At this stage, it is also important to set up measurable KPIs in order to later be able to follow up and evaluate the work. You can read more about this in our blog post “Monitoring and analyzing social media”.
