Steps in a social media strategy for your business

Are you using social media already for your business or thinking about using it?

Then you need to develop a social media strategy to make the most of your time on social media and generate the best results for your business.
Here are a few key steps and points to think about when creating your social media strategy.

Set objectives: Think about why you want your business to use social media? Are you joining to make more contacts within your industry? Do you want to build relationships using an online medium? Would you like more engagement from your current customers?

Once you determine your purpose for using social media you can set your goals and objectives for what you want to achieve. These will also help to measure your success and plan more effective ongoing strategies.

Create a bio for your business: On most social media sites there is an option to include a short description about your business. This is crucial so other users can find you and understand who you are straight away. Write two or three sentences describing your business and the value you can offer and don’t forget to add your web address.

Choose a social media site: There are many different social media sites, including social networking sites including Facebook, Twitter, blogs, YouTube, to name a few. Examine the characteristics of each site to determine which one best suits your goals and business values. For example, if your goal was to make new business contacts, perhaps LinkedIn would be ideal.

What content will you share? Sharing interesting and valuable information will get you more followers and prompt engagement. Your objectives provide a good guide for what information to share. For instance if you are aiming to be seen as an industry expert, your posts should relate to your industry and be highly useful and informative.

How will you engage your followers? Think about how you can get your followers to participate in a conversation with you. This could be by posting valuable content, asking questions or commenting on their posts. Engagement and communication is a two-way street, if you make the effort your customers will too, thus building stronger relationships.

How will you measure success? By measuring your success you’ll discover which actions get the best results so you can quickly change tactics to get better outcomes. You could use a paid or free social media monitoring service or develop your own system. For example social sprout is a paid service and monitors your followers, influence, engagement, clicks and more.

Who will manage your social media accounts? Social media management is a PR and communications discipline, so if you don’t have a qualified person within your organisation, think about outsourcing it to a reputable agency.

A social media strategy will help you define your purpose for using social media for your business. This will help you to communicate with your followers effectively and position your brand on social media appropriately.

Sydney Social Media Agency, CP Communications provides specialist social media strategies as well as traditional and online PR strategies that get amazing results. Contact us today. For more information see www.cpcommunications.com.au