Social media marketing plans are in-depth outlines of everything you want to achieve by making your company active on social media. Without a solid plan, social media marketing feels like a meaningless task, and your potential for success suffers greatly without direction.
While social media might have seemed like the Wild West of a brand’s marketing efforts, the outlet for advertising has matured to the point where it provides companies with concrete, real, and measurable impacts on their business’ profits. Social media marketing has to work in sync with the rest of the business strategy to ensure that the overall goals of the brand are being attained.
Make Goals for Your Social Media Impact
Just like any other marketing plan, the first step to a solid one is to set goals. Outlining your goals provides you with a clear way to measure the success of your marketing plan, and it is a way you can keep track of the return on investment (ROI). Social media marketing helps your business reach numerous goals, but some of the most common ones you might want to include are.
While all of these goals are a great way to begin, it’s important that you begin by focusing on just one or two of them at a time. Creating goals for a social media marketing plan is just like anything else in life – you do not want to start out too broad with a goal, as this would mean that you’ve spread your resources too thin and you risk not achieving your main purpose.
Create Social Media Profiles (Or Spruce up Old Ones)
You have your goals pinned down, so it’s time to start creating profiles that will wow your potential customers and clients. There are a few mini-steps to this one. So let’s begin with the first one – figuring out what social media networks you should join.
What Social Networks to Join
There are unique aspects to every social media outlet out there. What works on one social media network isn’t going to work on another, and the primary characteristics of each network can vary greatly. You don’t need to be active on every social media network! The key is to focus on just one or two that will help you best achieve your social media marketing plan.
The audiences and demographics of social networks are arguably the most imperative factor you need to consider. You’ve most likely already obtained a good idea of where your customers tend to hang out online, but reports such as The Demographics of Social Media Users by Pew Research Center lay out some concrete data for the five largest social networks – Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
