Social media has become the next big thing. One can’t deny the relevance of social media marketing in driving website traffic, creating brand awareness and generating leads.
Statistics show around 90 percent of adults aged 18-29 are on social media. Most people mention social media as their preferred source of communication with businesses.
After reading this, you may consider creating a social media strategy and want to start straight away. However, there are a few things to consider before creating a social media strategy. These pointers ensure you don’t mess up your campaign.
Define Goals and Objectives
The first thing you want to do before coming up with a social media strategy is to have a clearly defined set of goals. You need to ask yourself, ‘what do you want to achieve out of your efforts?’. Social media marketing isn’t about flipping a switch and calling it a day.
So to start, it is important to set SMART goals. These are goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and time-bound. Your goals will not only determine how much effort you put but also what type of resources you will need to invest in to get certain results. Some social media goals you can consider include:
- Increase brand awareness
- Higher quality of sales
- Improve ROI (return on investment)
- Create a loyal fan base
Target Audience
Where are your customers likely to be found? Approximately 70 percent of adults use Facebook but that doesn’t mean your customers are actively engaging with your brand there.
When you target your audience, you get to understand things like who buys your products, their age groups, and income level. It’s important you understand demographics such as age, location, job title, and income level. What are their pain points? Their challenges and needs?
All these are necessary as they inform the type of content to use. But more so, you also need to determine what social media channel will be most effective towards achieving your goals. You can learn more about this through researching essential demographic data for each social media platform. This will help you determine what tactics to employ.
Track, Measure and Improve
Remember those goals you set out to achieve? You will need to find a way of measuring your work to ensure that you are meeting your goals. Metrics are important in social media marketing as they help you understand how your business is doing out in the public.
To select metrics, you ask yourself, ‘what social media metrics are associated with my overall goals?’ Vanity metrics such as likes and followers will not be enough to tell the full story of how well your brand is doing on social media. There are 4 main ways you can measure metrics – reach, engagement, clicks and hashtag performance.
Finally, it is important to often and always check up on how your social media strategy is doing. Change is constant. Platforms such as Facebook change their algorithms all the time. Therefore, there is a need for you to continuously track and measure your online activities to see which areas need improvement. 
Investigate your competitors
This is an important step to an effective social media strategy. It’s important you investigate your competitors to see what they’re doing. In doing this, you learn from their failures and successes.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not telling you to copy exactly what they’re doing. No! Researching your competitors lets you know what’s working for them so you can adjust and incorporate it into yours. Before creating content, it’s good you investigate what others are doing. You often find new ways to look at the content by analyzing what’s making your competitors successful. 
Create engaging content
No one maintains interest in content that is not engaging. Therefore, it is very important to always try and create content that is engaging, but that it also aligned with your brand’s identity. So you need to ask questions such as what type of content should be posted? What about time and frequency? In doing all these things, you will be able to have a successful social media strategy.
