Create Compelling Social Media Strategy In 7 Easy Steps

Create Compelling Social Media Strategy In 7 Easy Steps

Social media plays a vital role in the success of your campaign. If used properly, you can make a stronghold connection with your target customers. Social media is not just about posting regular updates but how efficiently you communicate with your customers or clients.

Social Media Strategy:

Social media strategy is the brief about your plans for your business to achieve desirable results. This strategy includes a forecast for where you want to be in near future.

1. Know Your Objectives:

Before you start planning your next big campaign, you should know the objective and the goals of your campaign. Don’t just shoot out to each and every one. setting objectives allows you to quickly react to your campaigns if they are not meeting your expectations. Without objectives, it is difficult to track your ROI.

The first step starts after you have set your objectives and goals. Write down what exactly you want, research about your competitors how they are doing and define your target audience. Keep it simple and focus on the SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-bound) strategy.

2. Know Your Audience:

Audience plays a vital part in the success of any campaign. If you haven’t classified your target audience, start characterizing your audience on the basis of gender, age. location, income, occupation, interest, etc. There is no reason for targeting everyone in the age group from 18 to 40 if they are not interested in what you are offering.

Research about challenges and problems that your target audience are facing, what are their expectations and what are the possible solutions to their problems.

know your audience

3. Know Your Competitors:

Before you go live with your campaign look for your competitors as they are also targeting the same set of audience. Having an eye on your competitors gives you an opportunity to learn from their successes and mistakes.

Find out two or more top competitors from the same industry you are in and analyze their social media platforms. It will give an idea about the content they are emphasizing on.

4. Developing a Message:

By this time you should have plenty of data, targetted audience, and competitors analysis. This is the time you to start building your message. These messages should be the key points

5. Choose Your Platforms and Improve Them:

All social media platforms look similar but they aren’t. You need to think and choose wisely the right one for your product or service.

For an instance, Pinterest and Instagram are good for fashion industry whereas LinkedIn is for business to business sales. To get in touch with the right set of audience you should also identify influencers. They can help you to reach right set of audience for your business.

Social media platforms

6. Build a Content Plan:

It’s time to create a content plan that engages your users. Content plan should include strategy, monthly editorial calendar, and content curation. Always think about how you can provide a real value to your customers. Experiment with different media options like infographics, videos, tutorials or guides. This will help your brand to engage your prospective customers.

What should you include in your content marketing plan:

  • Type of content you are going to post on your social media platforms
  • How frequently you will post
  • Will you going to promote the content and how
  • Who will be going to create the content

build a content plan

7. Test and Evaluate:

Social media is not about sticking to one plan, it is about testing and evaluating. To evaluate your results you can:

  • Use URL shortener to analyze clicks you get for particular post
  • Use Google analytics to track traffic
  • Social media analytics tools like Buffer, Cyfe, and Hootsuite

Wrapping It Up:

One of the important factors to understand is that your social media marketing plan should be regularly changing. It will help you to tackle unexpected challenges and attain your goal.

If you find this article useful share it across and help others to make a compelling social media strategy.

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outstanding-social-media-marketing-tools

Outstanding Social Media Marketing Tools For Startups

Every social media marketer is looking for tools that can ease their work and bring productivity at workplace. To perform better you must invest in right tools to help you optimize your posts.

Social media has emerged great opportunities for companies to establish a brand, to share a great content and attract more and more customers. It is cost effective and saves a lot of time, unlike traditional marketing. Moreover, to scale your social media campaigns, you need some essential tools for scheduling, making visual graphics and video making.

Below are 13 outstanding social media tools that will take your efforts to next level.

To schedule the posts:

Buffer-social-media-marketing-tool

  1. Buffer: Buffer is mostly used and recognizable tool used in the industry. It allows you to schedule your post across various platforms including Facebook, Twitter, G+ and many others. Also, it lets you post in specific patterns such as everyday or weekend. All these functions make this tool very effective and famous.
  2. Hootsuite: Similar to Buffer, Hootsuite is also a powerful tool for social media marketer. You can share content across different platforms and networks, all from one central dashboard. The best part about Hootsuite is, you can monitor your reports and team collaboration features.

Other Scheduling Tools:

  1. Everypost
  2. SocialOomph
  3. Sprout Social

Visuals and infographic tools:

  1. Canva: This powerful online image tool that is suitable for all type of design work. This includes a presentation, social media posts, icons, images and various others to choose from.
    The foremost feature of canva is dedicated to infographics maker that you can employ for free. Another handy feature that canva provides is their ios app that can be used while you are traveling.
    Canva-Social-media-marketing-tool
  2. Piktochart: Piktochart is one of my favorites to create infographics and presentations. It lets you create a dull presentation into a meaningful and engaging infographics. Piktochart’s editor lets you customize fonts, color schemes, graphics and images.
    Piktochart is available in three basic themes for free. Whereas, pro account costs you somewhere around $29/ month.

Other Infographic Tools:

  1. Vizualize
  2. Easel.ly
  3. Infogr.am

Video Making Tools:

  1. Animoto: This beautiful tool allows you to create video from your photos, video clips, and music. Animoto adds a professional touch to your images with a little trial error. Animoto offers various customizable free and pro templates for your videos.
    animoto
  2. PowToons: PowToons is very essential tools to create animations fro scratch. A free account comes with basic animation and slide features with no downloading and for non-commercial purposes only. However, pro accounts come with various animations and other royalty free music and commercial rights.

Other Video Making Tools:

  1. GoAnimate
  2. Nutshell
  3. Magisto

URL Shortener:

  1. Bit.ly: This free tool allows you to share and customize your long URL into a shorter one. Bit.ly is one of the most popular and first of its kind that provides shortening service. Not only this, this powerful tool offers tracking service so that you know how many people are clicking on your link.
  2. Goo.gl: Another famous and free URL shortener provided by Google. Easy to use, goo.gl tracks how many times your link has been clicked.
    google-url-shortener

Content Searching Tools:

  1. Buzzsumo: Buzzsumo is a great way to research for your next content marketing strategy. Buzzsumo lets you explore the relevant content in your industry. Just type a keyword in and it will show you best performing and most shared content on the web.
  2. Facebook/Twitter Trending: You can take competitive advantage from Facebook’s and Twitter’s trending news and topics. On Facebook, you get the trending results according to your location and social behavior.
    facebook-trends
    On the other hand, similar to Facebook, Twitter also trends are also based on your location and to whom you follow.
    Twitter-trends

Other Content Research Tools:

  1. Google AdWards Keyword Tool
  2. Quora
  3. Buzzfeed

Conclusion

Social Media Marketing tools are the great way to save time and resources. While there are lots of free and paid tools your business needs to understand which tool can benefit them in the long run.

If you know and have used a different tool that has benefited you comment below and let me know.

 

600 Million! Instagram Surpasses its Users as Growth Inclines

Social media has seen a drastic change in the year of 2016. Various platforms have rolled out series of features. These features included live streaming, creating stories and many more.

Instagram is one of the major players owned by Facebook. They have recently announced that they have reached over 600 million users. They have acquired the last 100 million users over the last six months. One of the key takeaways is that most of the 600 million are likely to be very active. This might be due to the Twitter’s decision to close down Vine or depicting Snapchat’s story features.

Few Takeaways From The Announcement:

  • Instagram is one of the most popular social media platforms used worldwide.
  • This shows that the platform is growing with the time. Instagram had around 300 million accounts back in Dec-2014 that has grown to 600 million this year.
  • This announcement has made Instagram a must use platform for all the brands.

New Features Launched by Instagram:

  • Pinch to Zoom: In the recent feature “Pinch to Zoom” let you zoom into photos and videos similar to Facebook and other social media platforms.
  • Save Drafts: As the name suggests, this feature allows you to save your post in drafts that can be changed or completed later. Drafts options appear when you press the back button while editing the image or post.
  • Live Video/Streaming: Live video allows users to broadcast and share what they are doing. Your followers will be notified when you start a live video to connect with you.

Conclusion:

With all the recent updates like live video broadcasting, disappearing messages with such a huge users have made Instagram favorite one.