What is social media strategy?
To define social media strategy, we first need to define social media. Literally, we're talking about media that is used for social interaction.
More specifically, media - in this case - often means internet-based applications or websites built around the theme of sharing content and information.
These are sites where you as a company can share information, interact with your customers and engage with these networks in order to benefit your brand presence, promotions, competitions or aspects of your business.
So with the above definition in mind, social media strategy encompasses a delivery plan and strategy for using these platforms (or at least the platforms deemed relevant) to your advantage, as well as continued support and delivery across these networks.
How can it help me?
Social media channels can help target specific user groups, and give you a voice in which to communicate with these people in an environment where they can communicate back, and interact with your presence.
These channels can be your audiences preferred way to communicate and so you can make it easy for them to engage with you and your brand. If required, this can help to bring a more human element to your business.
These users can also often subscribe to or follow your content updates in some way, allowing you to reach an interested audience who can help spread or share your content or promotions to their friends and network.
Social media strategy can also open up possibilities for unique platform-based promotions or competitions, to encourage users to engage with the brand through a certain network, or in a certain way.
All of these elements contribute towards helping increase your web presence and brand awareness online, not to mention the major SEO benefits to social media too. Increased backlinks and highly targeted visitors all contribute to improving your SEO.
How do we do it?
Effective social media is reliant on having a well defined target audience. Without a good idea of where your users are networking or socialising you won't be able to target them or present yourself in the right light. So first steps will involve looking at your target market and relevancy. There's no point having a Twitter account if all of your target market don't have accounts.
One of the biggest mistakes often made with social media is to just set up profiles on all the available networks and assume that by doing this, and letting them run on auto-pilot, there will be some sort of benefit. Chances are this could do more harm than good. Without research and a strong strategy in place, you could end up wasting time, money and putting out a negative brand message.
QueryClick have a more effective approach to social media, involving a number of steps to make sure your social media presence is relevant, strong and effective.
Our process starts with marketplace analysis, both competitor and community focused, followed by discussions with the client on any existing or previous social media activity. This gives us a good idea of your current setup, and where a good place to start might be.
Combined with your business goals and audience profiles, as well as marketplace discussion a social media strategy can be created.
We can handle the setup of profiles on relevant platforms, as well as moderation of spam and maintenance of the profiles.
Social media tracking is also something we can provide, reporting on things like brand mentions and traffic sources. THis is combined with running surveys as a means to measuring effectiveness and current opinions.
Despite being completely custom, our solutions all cover a few basic aspects of the social media strategy.
Most involve posting frequent targeted content with backlinks, mini-campaigns to actively promote offers, continued market research for devising offers, optimisation of these offers and then campaign specific tracking following offer launches.
Some of our work also involves engaging with followers or the community on a regular basis, and working our conversion rate optimisation skills on any relevant social media aspects.
Social media is not just Facebook and Twitter
Social media strategy, like many of our other services is a highly customised solution, and so is determined entirely by your requirements. The best way to find out how it can specifically help your business is to get in touch and discuss it with us directly.