What is the key ingredient if you want to have an effective social media following? You guessed it:  STRATEGY!

Why?

Because there’s more to social media than just posting beautiful pictures of you sunbathing on a beach in Florida.

Without proper knowledge of your goals, target audience, creativity, and trends, it is very difficult to reach the desired results on social media.

So, Bringing In The Green is giving you the top 5 questions you need to ask to build a perfect social media marketing strategy.

Let’s go!

  1. Why do you even want to be on Social Media?

Activity without purpose is the drain of your life.

The very first question you want to ask yourself is “Why?” The answer cannot just be “because everyone else is”.

Why do you really want to get onto the social media bandwagon?

Is it to promote your products? Or are you looking to gain traffic to your business website? Are you looking to provide the best customer service on social media?

Whatever your reasons are to be on social media, it’s important for you to prioritize.

Here are a few goals you might have:

  • Brand awareness
  • Increase website traffic
  • Generate leads for your business
  • Improve brand engagement
  • Build a community for your brand
  • Make SALES!

Tip: Focus on a few goals if you have a small team. Pursue more goals as you grow.

  • Who are you trying to target through Social Media campaigns?

Understanding the target audience is essential to creating the best content.

Without a proper understanding of the target audience, all your efforts on social media will go down the drain.

You don’t want that to happen, right?

So, if you have been running your business for quite a long time, there are chances you might know who your target audience is. But, if you haven’t, here are a few questions to ask:

  • Who are you looking to target?
  • What interests them?
  • Where do they visit online most often?
  • Why do they consume the content you produce?
  • How do they consume the content?
  • What will you share on Social Media?

Before you even start creating content on social media, you need to brainstorm with your team to prepare a theme for your social media content.

Today, all major brands have more than one theme which helps to keep the social media page alive with a range of content.

This significantly improves audience engagement on your content as well.

One of the best ways to create content for social media is by understanding the following two things:

  • What are the challenges your target audience faces?
  • What kind of content helps them overcome the challenges?

Tip: Don’t be too promotional with your social media posts. People don’t like to be sold. One way of knowing what to post is going back and reminding yourself of the importance of understanding your target audience.

  • Which Social Media Platform will you use?

What are the top social media platforms businesses and personal brands use to share content?

Apart from the big four (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn), there are more than 20 other social media platforms you must consider!

To know which ones are the best for the kind of business you have, you would have to go back to point number two and understand your target audience.

Top Social Media Platforms include:

  • Facebook – 2.23 billion monthly average users (MAU)
  • YouTube – 1.9 billion MAU
  • WhatsApp – 1.5 billion MAU
  • Messenger – 1.3 billion MAU
  • WeChat – 1.06 billion MAU
  • Instagram – 1 billion MAU
  • Tumblr – 642 million MUV
  • Twitter – 335 million MAU
  • Reddit – 330 million MAU
  • LinkedIn – 294 million MAU
  • Snapchat – 255 million MAU
  • Pinterest – 250 million MAU

Tip: Don’t try being on all the social media platforms. Select a few and stay focused.

  • When will you share the posts on Social Media?

The last part of building an effective social media marketing strategy is figuring out the right time to share content.

Understanding the behavior of your target audience will definitely give you an edge in creating the perfect posting schedules on social media.

It really depends on your audience, so focusing on their patterns will help you build a great social media marketing strategy.

The best way to understand this is to test. In the beginning, post some in the morning, some in the afternoon, some in the evenings, and then monitor engagement. Watch the trends and that will help you identify the best times to maximize reach. The great news is, once you determine that, you can preschedule posts in order to make sure you don’t always have to be “on-call” at a certain time.