Welcome to Kiran Gutha‘s blog. 6 tips for getting creative with your social media strategy. Developing and creating an effective social media strategy in six simple steps.
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Social Media Strategy
Social media can be an excellent and cost-effective way to attract positive attention to your company, product, or professional services.
With the right strategy, you can interact directly with customers and thought-leaders worldwide.
Conversely, the careless use of social media can damage your business or career in a matter of days.
To keep social media from becoming a time-wasting distraction or a reputation-tarnishing pastime, it’s necessary to have a well-planned and efficiently managed strategy.
That social media strategy should support your business goals and authentically reflect your brand or personality.
Additionally, over the past several years, social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn have become increasingly powerful communication and marketing tools.
Because you don’t know when prospective employers, partners, customers, or rivals are viewing your posts, it is extremely important to keep pace with best practices and observe professional social media etiquette.
1. Develop Your Strategy
Before planning a social media campaign, it’s first necessary to establish an overarching strategy.
Executing and refining that strategy will be an ongoing activity. Here are some tips to help you get started.
- Define your goals. Are you trying to raise awareness of your organization and generate favorable perceptions of your brand?
- Or, do you want to build website traffic and attract new leads?
- Social media can also let you hear what people are saying about your organization, learn about your target market, and identify possible opportunities for new products.
- Prioritizing defined goals can help you make smart choices from the start and measure progress as the campaign progresses.
- Visualize who you want to reach. Create a “persona” for each category of targeted prospects.
- A persona can include demographic information such as age, gender, education, and income, plus insights on where prospects get their information, what groups they belong to, and what problems you can help them solve.
- Choose the social media platform that your target audience uses.
- B2C companies may tend to use Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.
- LinkedIn can provide B2B companies with a way to connect with decision-makers who may be difficult to reach via the traditional cold call.
- Determine the personality you want to project.
- Are you the outgoing, talkative type who likes to comment on every new trend and topic?
- Or are you a quiet observer who only speaks up when you have something insightful to say?
- It may be best to strike a balance. You want people to know you’re listening and participating, but you don’t want to dominate the conversation.
2. Look, Listen and Learn
Instead of diving headfirst into every social media channel you find, learn how to build an audience on one channel first.
Once you have mastered that one, branch out to other relevant channels. Use online tools such as TweetDeck or HootSuite to manage your activity on multiple social networks.
Observe how your competitors and similar businesses use social media.
For example, some companies use Twitter and Facebook to offer coupons, promote causes, and share photos and videos.
Others use social media to spotlight their customers, call attention to case studies and blog posts, or start online communities.
Your goal isn’t to copy someone else’s strategy. Instead, see what’s possible and then get creative in ways that will please your customers and meet your goals.
3. Attract Followers
Write interesting posts.
Think quality over quantity.
You can create hundreds or even thousands of posts on your social network, but if they are not compelling to your audience, they are essentially useless.
In addition to posting great content, post comments on blogs, and “like” other pages.
Encourage your website visitors or blog readers to follow you.
Include your social media links in your email signatures, business cards, newsletters, and press releases.
4. Give People Reasons to Engage
Remember, the most popular people on social media networks aren’t always talking about themselves.
They recognize and help others, including customers, business partners, and journalists.
Encourage people to engage with you and your brand:
- Ask for advice
- Conduct surveys and contests
- Offer coupons or incentives
- Retweet posts
- Be nice to others (they’ll probably return the favor)
5. Establish a Reasonable Schedule
Don’t let your social media activity stagnate, but don’t let it overwhelm you either.
Commit to a reasonable investment of time and energy. To stay productive, some people schedule 30 minutes once or twice a day to post something new, listen to what others are saying and respond to direct messages.
Either way, don’t allow social media to keep you from face-to-face networking.
6. Measure the Results
Attracting a high number of fans and followers isn’t the best way to measure success if your followers can’t help your business.
On the other hand, if you connect with one influential thought-leader or an investor with deep pockets, then it may not matter whether you have 100 followers or 1,000.
How you measure the results of your social media efforts will depend on the goals you set at the outset.
Social media holds tremendous promise for marketers and business owners, but there’s also the potential for costly stumbles.
Given the rapidly changing landscape of the social networks, professionals may benefit from pursuing advanced training in the field, perhaps through an online certificate program led by industry experts.
Regardless of whether they pursue training or take a do-it-yourself approach, business owners and marketers should consider adopting a creative and strategic approach to social media.
Want to learn more about social media strategy from a real-world experienced trainer “Kiran Gutha”.
100% online programs for individuals, as well as professional, advanced professional programs in Internet Marketing, and Social Media Marketing are available. Contact me now with your requirement.!
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