How to build a social media strategy specific to your business?

For businesses maintaining a presence, social media is a no-brainer. Brands that invest in social media marketing benefit from increased sales and stronger customer loyalty over their competition. When consumers follow a brand on social media platforms, research demonstrates that 89% will buy from that brand and 75% of consumers will increase their spending with that brand.

As more and more businesses recognise the importance of digital marketing, the social landscape is reaching a saturation point. This presents a unique challenge to generate visibility to the right people at the right time.

Setting goals within silos inhibits social media from visibly influencing an organisations goals and demonstrating its value to the entire company. Establish time to discuss these goals with management to identify how social media can support other teams and what insights marketers can share to implement the most significant impact.

Primary goals for social media include:

• Increasing brand awareness
• Boosting web traffic
• Growing the brand’s audience
• Promoting content
• Increasing community and engagement
• Driving sales
• Connecting with target audience
• Providing customers service and support
• Track and understand competitors.

Appropriately determine your buyer personas and audience to target their needs and interests. By considering your audience, this will enable you to establish what content will attract the type of customers you hope to gain and how to create engaging content to maintain their interest.

Renowned author Gary Vaynerchuk says,

“The key to social media marketing success isn’t about pushing out a lot of content – it’s about pushing out specific content tailored towards your target audience and using the right platform to do so”.

It’s essential to understand where your audience is today and where they may be tomorrow. In the table below, we have identified the different social media platforms available to businesses, the users they attract and how to leverage them.

Growing your social following supports business’ revenue goals, however, to attract new followers’ marketers need an understanding of what types of content will engage (and disengage) their customers.

Consumers believe a brand’s social media presence stands out from competition when its creative, memorable and impactful. Below we have identified the different types of content consumers engage with:

An in-depth understanding of your audience and what captures their interest can create a powerful social media campaign.

Generating buzz and excitement on Twitter is how Wendy’s promoted its new breakfast menu offering. The fast-food brand, known for its snarky comebacks, went “private” with its Twitter account and offered a coupon where only its existing followers could acquire.

Wendy’s leveraged its 3.6 million followers to further generate hype by roasting competitors with #WendysBreakfastBattle and posting the most popular tweets on a billboard in New York’s Times Square. The stunt resulted in more than 10,000 follower requests within 36 hours.

Whilst most businesses aren’t operating with Wendy’s resources, they can learn from this campaign the power of turning your fans into brand advocates. Leverage your social media following to spread the word regarding new product launches through user-generated content and make it easy – and appealing – for fans to share your brand content on their social feeds.

1. Increase use of video content – Both long-form and short-form videos are among the most shared social media content. Audiences want to hear from your business and consume content in a more entertaining way.
2. Emphasis on brand voice and authenticity – Consumers are gravitating towards businesses whose values align with their own.
3. Useful content vs engaging content – Businesses have shifted from providing useful content to engaging content. It’s no longer enough to provide your audience with useful content, it’s about creating content that captures their attention and maintains this engagement.
4. The importance of listening –Staying in tune with your audience enables you to better connect through the right conversations. Businesses should also listen to how their audience reacts to content.

Businesses should evaluate if they’re keeping pace with their industry standards. Certain industries are likely to receive a higher volume of engagement than others. Our table below highlights the difference in industry performance.

	Average inbound engagements per day	Average engagement per posts
Consumer goods	270	38
Education	64	6
Finance & banking	75	10
Food & drink	98	16
Healthcare	78	14
Legal	306	30
Media & entertainment	1123	28
Not for profit	276	19
Real Estate	41	6
Recruiting & staffing	60	19
Retail	256	36
Software & internet	357	25
Sports	975	29
Travel & tourism	101	14

Social media metrics are critical to measure success of a particular campaign, how well your social strategy is performing and ultimately the impact on your overall business performance.

Every social media platform has its native analytics. We recommend using a social media analytics tool to minimise time pulling metrics from all sources and manually creating reports.

We have identified essential social media metrics for tracking progress: