Why you need a social media promotion strategy?
1. Expand your other marketing efforts, so your content has the chance to be seen by a wide audience, and
... [Show More] hopefully, the right audience.
2. Build brand awareness. Gone are the days when your only way to build that same awareness was through billboards or magazine and television ads. With social media, you have the ability to bring your brand content directly to your customers, partners, and prospects. Now you can be where your audience already is.
3. Social media is one of the most powerful ways to connect with your audiences. Sprout Social reports that “When consumers follow a brand on social, 67% of consumers are more likely to spend more with that brand, and 78% say they will visit that brand’s physical retail store. This is especially true among millennials: 84% said they were more likely to buy from a brand they follow on social media compared to a brand they don’t follow on social.”
4. Social media helps you attract buyers to your products and services, and it gives you the ability to directly have conversations with those individuals at the time and place of their choosing. It sounds like a lot of opportunity, doesn’t it? In fact, social media is, in many ways, the ultimate way to do inbound marketing. That’s because it’s a one-to-one medium, which gives you and your company the chance to market in a direct, but very human way.
What are two important parts of your social media strategy?
1. The buyer persona: A buyer persona helps you determine who your ideal customer is. Understanding who you want to reach will guide you in a variety of ways, from choosing the right social media platforms to use, to creating the best mix of content to share, to being able to target advertising to the right audience. Make sure you understand all the basic demographics about your buyer persona like age, gender, income, occupation, interests, motivations, and objections. But if you can, also go a few steps further and dig into their psychographics — which websites they visit, which online shops they frequent, and which social sites they like best. Social media gives you the ability to be more personal and really hone in on the right type of persona for your products and services, so the more you know, the better you can target social audiences.
2. Aligning your social strategy to your business objectives: Having business goals and objectives in place will make it easier for you to create social media goals that will transform viewers and readers into buyers. As with your business goals, you want your social media goals to use the S-M-A-R-T method: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Timely. As an example, if your company has a goal of building brand awareness among college students, one of your social media goals might be to develop videos with content that’s helpful or funny for college students, and set an advertising goal of reaching 250,000 college students by the end of the year. Even better, you can set a secondary goal of having the students interact with the content in some way — commenting on it or sharing it with their friends — thus increasing brand reach and giving you a direct way to measure if and how you’re meeting your goal. Being able to articulate your social media goals and plan the impact your goals will have on the company’s return on investment, or ROI, is also the key to securing executive buy-in and budget for your campaigns. Having your buyer persona and business objectives in mind will be helpful as you traverse your way through building your social media strategy.
What are some aspect of social media strategy?
“The components that go into our social media strategy, we basically look at four different things. The first one is paid social media. So, all the efforts that we're going to put out there to proactively talk to our audience. So, the second one is a community management. So, it's really a tracking the conversations and being on top of what's happening out there. Not only with the brand itself, but also with a pop culture. The third one is organic content. So, all the content that we are going to put out there, but not necessarily sponsored through a paid media. Then the last piece, which I think it's a piece that I like the most. It's really our reactive power from a creative standpoint to really respond as fast as possible to all the things that are happening in that channel. So how do we spot something and come back with a creative idea that talks and inserts the brand into that conversation?”
To build your social media strategy, you'll need to be able to?
1. Explain each social media channel and how each one is best used for social media promotion,
2. Understand the impact of social listening and engagement,
3. Develop a social content strategy for your social media plan,
4. Identify ways that metrics are crucial to understanding the success of your digital efforts, and finally, how to
5. Integrate social media into your other inbound efforts, including your website, conversations, and blog posts.
Why you should care abut facebook?
But there are two other reasons to care about Facebook--their advertising tools are some of the best to target your ideal buyer, and their groups are an excellent way to build a captive audience, which in many ways may prove more fruitful than other ways of reaching your customers. This means Facebook may still be one of the most important platforms for your social media strategy.
what are the two types of facebook pages?
There are two types of Facebook pages: a personal page and a business page. You might have heard organic reach is better on a personal page, which is true, but there are several reasons you should use a Facebook business page for your company instead. First off, Facebook requires businesses to use business pages and can shut down pages that do not comply with their policy. Personal pages have a 5,000-person friend limit, whereas business pages can have millions of followers. Having a business page also gives you access to analytics, called Insights; the ability to correctly categorize your company for search; add a mission statement; a product catalog; awards; and give your customers the chance to give reviews. But the most important reason for you to have a Facebook Business page is for advertising. Facebook advertising allows you to hyper-target the audiences you care most about, including your own prospect lists so you can directly deliver content of value. You can also use Facebook Advertising across their other services — Instagram, Facebook Messenger, and WhatsApp. Adding a Facebook pixel on your website even helps you retarget those visitors with ads on Facebook. On Facebook, you can publish a variety of content including text and photo posts, carousel photo posts, and video posts. You can even do live Facebook videos and share "Stories," microcontent designed to disappear after 24 hours, similar to Snapchat and Instagram Stories. And finally, of Facebook's nearly two and a half billion users, 400 million belong to a Facebook Group. Facebook groups help you build community, delight your audience, and help you reach fans that you wouldn't normally be able to reach with organic posts. Facebook is putting more emphasis on Groups these days, and savvy businesses that are using them are finding that engagement is higher than other parts of Facebook.
Why you should start a facebook group?
"Facebook groups can be really, really useful for companies if you're looking to start one. I definitely recommend starting with a clear purpose. Don't just start a group because someone said you should start a group. It could be a pop-up group. I've seen this be very, very successful. It might only be open for a week or 30 days. It might be for a specific challenge or to support a certain event. Certainly, you could have an ongoing group as a separate group, as a user group, a mastermind, a support group, many different ways you can use groups. Another great way is a testimony group so that you have existing customers just raving about the value that they get from your product or service and you can certainly bring prospects in there as well."
Why is Youtube important?
With over 2 billion users, YouTube is the second largest social network and, interestingly enough, it's also the second largest search engine in the world — behind Google, of course. To give you a sense of its importance, more than 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute and almost 5 billion videos are watched on Youtube every single day. It's almost mind boggling to think about! Google reports that 6 out of 10 people prefer online video platforms to live TV, which means, in many ways, you have the potential to reach an even bigger audience for a more affordable cost than on television. On mobile, YouTube reaches more 18-49 year olds in the US than any cable network. This is important, because television is a very different thing today than it was even a couple years ago. In fact, by 2025, half of viewers under the age of 32 will not subscribe to a pay-TV service
What you need to know about Youtube marketing?
Remember how I mentioned it was the second largest search engine? That means not only does it help with SEO, but YouTube also has some of the highest referral rates of all the social platforms. Also important, the platform has high conversion rates when it comes to paid advertising. If you offer a complex product or service, having great videos can help sway prospects into a purchase. Creating video isn't always easy or free, but the benefits and the statistics far outweigh the cost of not participating at all. So, what can you do on YouTube? Not only can you host original content and have channel subscribers, it's a great place to syndicate content and to consider advertising, including interstitial advertising — short clips that appear before a video. Additionally, over half of YouTube users use the site to learn how to do things they've never done before, which makes it a great place to think about how you can develop interesting, educational material for your customers.
What you need to know about instagram?
I mentioned Instagram already, but let's give it a longer look. It's owned by Facebook, but the audiences and purposes are a bit different. With 1 billion people using Instagram every month, it's the third largest social media platform and the fastest growing. Instagram is a photo- and videobased social network, and users follow individuals and brands to be delighted by interesting visuals. According to the Pew Research Center, the biggest demographic group are males Transcript: Lesson One Developing a Social Media Strategy between 18 - 24 years old, while 75% of all users are aged between 18 and 24. but even that is shifting as more and more individuals adopt the platform. While the primary functionality is sharing photos and videos, the most popular feature is Instagram Stories. Like the Snapchat platform, Instagram Stories enable the sharing of quick, "instant" photos and videos, often with fun filters and visual features. Stories disappear after twenty-four hours for viewers but remain stored in an archive for you to see or repost again. Over 500 million stories are posted every day and one third (1/3) of the most viewed Instagram Stories are from businesses. You'll want to convert a personal Instagram account to an Instagram business profile to include a phone number and address in your bio and enable the "shop" button. And to do that, you're required to have a Facebook Business page, which you will also need to take advantage of advertising on this channel. Instagram is important because it has very deep engagement, especially for brands.Over 90% of users follow at least one brand account. Instagram images get an average of 23% more engagement than their Facebook counterparts. That means advertising on Instagram is going to be even more successful for your business. Sounds like a great reason to use Instagram, doesn't it?
What you need to know about Twitter?
Let's move on to Twitter, the popular microblogging network. Twitter is the ultimate by-theminute news network. It's a place where you can see what's happening in that very moment around the world, whether it's someone feeling an earthquake in China or watching a football game in Boston. Users share messages of up to 280 characters, called "tweets," which can include photos, videos, links, and animated .gifs. To give you a sense of the volume of information shared, there are more than 500 million tweets sent every day. Twitter is a fantastic place for you to discover what's trending with your industry, customers, employees, partners, and prospects. You should be sharing content frequently — more frequently than on other platforms, in fact — and you should be engaging regularly with your audience.Twitter reports that 80% of their advertisers' inbound social customer service requests happen on Twitter. It's also a place where people frequently express both pleasure and dissatisfaction about products and services, making it a channel your business can't afford to Transcript: Lesson One Developing a Social Media Strategy ignore. Twitter also owns Periscope, a live streaming video channel. Over 350,000 hours of live video are streamed on the network every day. There are several forms of advertising on Twitter, including ads in the news stream, with trending topics, promoted profiles, and a lot more. But one of the best uses of Twitter is the organic networking you can do directly with your audience, engaging in conversation that helps build loyalty and trust.
What you need to know about Linkedin?
LinkedIn is the platform most business-to-business, or B2B, marketers are familiar with. It used to be a network primarily used for recruiting, but these days it's also becoming a platform to find the latest news and to stay networked with people all over the world. Now users can share status updates much in the same way as they do with Facebook, with photo or video posts that can be shared, liked, and commented on. There are several reasons to use LinkedIn. It's a great way to look up individuals you might be meeting with, or to find out more about a prospect you're interested in reaching out to. Additionally, it's a great place to build thought leadership, to offer value through targeted advertising, to network in groups, and to share content that will drive links back into your website properties.
What you need to know about pintrest?
Pinterest is a channel many people think of as only for business-to-consumer, or B2C, but there are a myriad of ways B2B companies can take advantage of the platform. If you aren't familiar with Pinterest, it's essentially a series of shared, often thematic bulletin boards where users can "pin" images, video, and links that resonate with them. What is unique to Pinterest is the average life of a pin is over three months, whereas on Twitter, a post's life is a matter of minutes and on Facebook, maybe an hour. Pinterest pins build SEO with referral traffic — referral traffic that can directly turn into leads and sales. As of 2019, 79.5% of Pinterest users are female, according to Statista. The male audience share has also increased over time from 14% in 2013 to 20.5% in 2019. Note that women have up to 80% of the buying power in a household, so it's an ideal place for many consumer goods companies to be. Chad Rogers, Co-Founder and CRO, Lemonlight "One of the social media platforms that I think is the most overlooked, and one of the highest trafficked is Pinterest. Pinterest has the fourth most traffic on the web. 98% of the viewers try to make or build whatever they see online. It is one of the most visual and best platforms to tell a story. So don't forget about Pinterest." How can your company use Pinterest? Create a board with links to your products and services. Or a board with your blog posts. Or a board demonstrating your company's thought leadership and awareness. Your HR team can benefit from a board detailing great things about working at your company. Consider creating boards for case studies, employee stories, white papers, or videos. The possibilities are truly endless.
What you need to know about Snapchat?
Snapchat is a channel that lost a bit of market share to Instagram when Instagram Stories launched, essentially copying the Snapchat business model. But with 210 million people, it still has a strong user base, and it's investing in areas like augmented reality, which may have exciting applications. Like Instagram Stories, Snapchat stories disappear after 24 hours. There are a bevy of filters users can employ to liven up video and images. Today, brands can advertise with stories more dynamic and longer lasting than personal snaps. The Snapchat audience skews young, with its largest demographic between the ages of 15-25.
What you need to know about Tik-tok?
And finally, there's TikTok. If you feel like the app came out of nowhere, you're not wrong. It launched in early 2018 and already has 400 million users. The parent company, Chinese owned Bytedance, acquired Music.ly, an app for lip synching songs, and merged it into TikTok. The newest player on the social media field fills the gap left behind after Twitter purchased Vine and incorporated it into their Periscope service, stripping it of the popularity it had with its 15 second videos, which can be strung together to make viewing of up to 60 seconds possible. TikTok is a fast-paced app. The second you log in, you see a video at the top of a feed that's algorithmically curated around your interests. If you enjoy the video you're watching, you can follow, comment, and like the content directly from the video post. The average user spends 52 minutes per day on TikTok. And brands are starting to get into the mix with advertising and organic posts. TikTok now offers five advertising tiers aimed at big brands but if you have amazing content, there is still a lot of organic potential to gain from the platform.
What is important in setting social media goals?
Let’s talk about setting social media KPIs. Once you’ve created a buyer persona and mapped out some S-M-A-R-T goals, you can do a deeper dive and determine what key performance indicators, or KPIs, you should be targeting in your social media strategy. A KPI is a quantifiable measure used to evaluate the success of an organization, employee, or project in meeting objectives for performance. Knowing what your KPIs are from the start will help you make crucial decisions on content, advertising, budget, and other resources you may need. The main thing to consider is how you can develop actionable goals instead of goals of merely reporting a high result on a vanity metric . And what’s a vanity metric? Simply put, a vanity metric is a surface-level metric made up of numbers or statistics that seem great when viewed in a presentation but don’t correlate to business success. For example, follower count is probably one of the fluffiest of the various KPIs. Having as many followers as possible may look impressive, but if they aren’t the right people following you — the ones who will buy your products and services — then that follower count is essentially only a vanity metric.
If your business goal is awareness....
To set the right KPIs, you need to go back to your business goals. If your goal is to increase sales, vanity metrics such as numbers of likes, shares, retweets, followers, and page views are not going to be the most important metrics for you to measure. But, if your goal is awareness, then those metrics may not just be vanity metrics. Followers, reach, and page views may be more important for you.
What are the four categories of social media KPIs, and most of your targets should fall within those areas?
● Reach
● Engagement
● Return on investment, or ROI
● Retention and Loyalty
What is Reach?
These KPIs tend to be the most fluffy and they veer toward what many think are vanity metrics, but if your business goals are tied to company awareness and reaching as many qualified users as possible, then these may be the KPIs you want to measure.
● Follower count: how many individuals follow your social channels.
● Impressions: how often your content is viewed.
● Mentions: how many times your brand is mentioned across social channels.
● Share of voice: how many people are talking about your brand vs. the competition.
What is engagement?
Engagement is next. These KPIs demonstrate how engaged your audience is and how they may be interacting with your content, which is usually a better indicator than reach when it comes to measuring the success of your campaigns. The following KPIs measure how people are taking action in relation to your brand:. ● Likes or favorites indicate that your viewers appreciate the content. This is a simple action and often one of the biggest vanity measures but useful to measure to determine if the content is of interest.
● Comments indicate direct engagement with your content.
● Sharing and retweets demonstrate that your audience cares enough about the content that they want to let others know. This also increases reach and awareness.
● Customer ratings and reviews demonstrate strong engagement and opinion. They are also one of the biggest indicators to other people that a product or a service is worth buying.
● Inbound website links from social media show that your content is interesting enough for your audience to click through to your site.
What is social media ROI?
Measuring social media ROI and garnering leads are goals that many salespeople and executives will gravitate toward. While often harder to drive, these are the types of KPIs that can directly affect the business's bottom line. This means that executives may be more open to listening to proposals from your social team when it comes to asking for additional budget or headcount to meet these business goals. Some of these KPIs include:
● Direct sales revenue from social media, such as orders that come in from a coupon or links into your website that lead to purchase.
● Lead conversions from social media campaigns. This may vary from company to company but could include email signups, downloads of materials like an ebook, or activations of trial software.
● Support costs per customer. If your business goal is to reduce customer support call costs, for example, you may want to set KPIs for how many calls you can offset by helping them on your social media channels instead. ● Lifetime value. This is the projected revenue a customer will generate in their lifetime. There are a variety of ways to calculate this number, and how you acquire the customer — in this case, through social media, especially acquisition plays and customer touch points — will affect the lifetime value.
What is retention and loyalty?
Last, but definitely not least, is retention and loyalty. If your business goals are centered around customer service excellence or on retaining customers, then your social KPIs should be aligned to reflect this. Consider the following:
● Customer reviews and ratings - mentioned previously, these are a fantastic measure of how your customers think about your brand and products.
● Issues resolved demonstrates how well you're doing (or not doing) taking care of your customers through social media.
● Another metric to consider in tandem is your SLA, or service-level agreement. In the social space the SLA usually refers to how long time passes between when a customer reaches out and when there is a response. Note that a response doesn't always mean the issue is resolved--that might be another KPI to consider.
● Time to resolution: How long it takes for a question that comes in from social media to receive not just a reply, but a resolution.
● Customer satisfaction - it's often tracked with a net promoter score (often called NPS), this gives you a sense of whether or not your social customer service efforts are working.
● Sentiment is a tricky metric to measure, but it's important because sentiment tells you what people are thinking and feeling about your brand. Is it negative? Perhaps your KPI should be set to shift that balance to positive.
When it comes to structuring a team, as always, start with?
Your business goals, be it sales, brand awareness, managing reputation, sales prospecting, recruiting, customer service, or something else. Knowing this up front helps you determine what channels you need, what content you need, your campaign possibilities, and the staffing you need to consider.
For example, if your company's goal is to provide stellar customer service, it means that you would put social goals and metrics behind responding to all customers in a certain timeframe, which in turn impacts how many channels you think you can manage, how many people you think you'll need to respond to, and if you need an internal or external team to help. If your goal is accelerated sales then you would focus on channels where you can build a presence that supports advertising, where you can find interesting ways to collect email or deliver promotional offers. That helps you understand which individuals and agencies you may need to involve to develop content.
What are the steps in creating a social media plan?
1. Consider who your business stakeholders may be
2. If going international consider there are different languages, social network preferences, and legalities that will figure into your staffing plans.
3. Outline your social media roadblocks
4. Create your social media roadmap.
5. Once you understand your goals and KPIs, and what you would like the future of your social media program to look like, you can start thinking about how to build a team to get you there.
Why you need to consider who your business stakeholders may be?
Next you need to consider who your business stakeholders may be. What do they care about? Their needs may be your needs. Your PR team may want to connect to social media influencers while your HR team might need your help recruiting via social networks. Having their buy-in may be what you need to convince executives that additional headcount is needed.
If you are planning for your social media to be international you need to remember?
Next, are you planning for your social media efforts to be international? Do you need to consider how you'll manage social networks such as Xing and Sina Weibo? There are different languages, social network preferences, and legalities that will figure into your staffing plans. The biggest challenge that most social media practitioners have is buy-in. Do you have consensus and buy-in from the decision makers in your company? If not, find an executive who can champion your ideas.
what are some social media roadblocks?
Then, outline your social media roadblocks. What do you need to really do social well in your organization? What might get in your way? The most obvious roadblocks for an organization tend to be lack of time and lack of people.
What is a social media roadmap?
This roadmap is your future-state plan, or essentially, how you plan to grow your social media program. As you put it together, you'll want to show how the various stakeholders in your business will benefit. Demonstrate how you see social media changing for your company in the next year, three years, or five years, and the impact it could have on the business.
What you need to remember when structuring your team?
First consider the types of roles you need how they map to your goals. If customer service is a priority, you may need a community manager. If you are developing educational material, you may want to consider a graphic designer who can develop beautiful infographics, or a videographer who is great at developing live video. What if you don't think you'll have the means to scale the team in the manner you would like? The good news is that there are options beyond your internal team. Think about how agencies may be able to help you meet your needs, particularly if you are a smaller team. Agencies can be costeffective when compared to headcount. You might consider using a social or digital agency for a specialized type of role to extend your team, such as developing content or managing engagement. The structure of your team itself and how it works is also important. A few years ago, analyst firm Altimeter outlined five types of social media team models, and this model still holds up today.
What are the five types of social media team models?
The Decentralized model: is one in which no specific department manages or coordinates content and strategy. The team shares responsibilities and ideas. A decentralized model tends to be representative of organizations in the early stages of implementing social. A Centralized team is one that stands alone and manages all activities.
The Hub and Spoke model is common in growing companies, in which one team coordinates with other groups within the organization. The majority of companies use this model, including companies such as Red Cross and Virgin.
The Multiple Hub and Spoke model, or “Dandelion” model, is one in which a main social media team works with smaller social media teams in different departments or business units. This is common for companies with international offices, such as IBM, Microsoft, or CNN.
A Holistic model is just like it sounds — everyone is involved. Few companies will end up using the holistic model. It requires great trust and training for employees. Dell, Zappos, Accenture are a few organizations who have used this structure
How to design a social media plan?
1. Plan your business and social goals. Plan these goals 1-3 years out, and make sure to consider your stakeholders' needs.
2. Identify your possible social media roles based on those goals, then
3. Develop a timeline for reaching those goals and building the team.
4. With that complete, you need to allocate or advocate for resources,
5. Finally, evangelize your plan throughout the organization. When others can see and believe your vision they will be more inclined to lend their support. [Show Less]