Biggest Flaws in a Social Media Strategy
Biggest Flaws in a Social MediaStrategy
What is a strategy? It is a high-level plan for bringing about adesired result, like achieving a goal or finding a solution to a problem. Mostof the people often get confused between strategy and tactics which is aspecific action to achieve a specific result.
Therefore, a successful social media strategy shouldn't be justfocused on tactics as it is nothing without a strategy. Well, there can be manyflaws in a social media strategy. Here are four common flaws in an ineffectivesocial media strategy, and tips on how to fix them.
- You don't know your audience
It's virtually impossible to write a successful social post withoutknowing who your audience is and what they're passionate about. A successfulsocial media strategy starts with defining audience personas. It is asemi-fictional representation of your ideal customer or core audience, based onmarket research and data you collect about your existing customers.
When building an audience persona, gather key information about yourcurrent customers or visitors, including demographics, career, behaviourpatterns, interests, etc. Keep in mind that a brand can have several audiencepersonas. For instance, let's say a brand sells marketing software. They canhave one audience of a digital marketer who would use the product, and anotheraudience of the C-suite executive who would be responsible for purchasing thesoftware.
Aside from identifying, understanding who your customers are canhelp determine which marketing platforms your brand should focus on, and whichones you should ignore.
For instance, if you are selling apparels for teenagers then youraudience will be kids between the ages of 12-17 years. Understanding thebehaviours and interests of your target leads to focusing on social platformslike Instagram and TikTok. However, don't relay too much on what is workingtoday. Always keep an eye on new social media platforms as they have an amazinggrowth opportunity.
- You'renot speaking with your audience
Using social platforms to promote a sale or encourage people to readyour blog shouldn't be the centre point of a social strategy. Communitymanagement and social listening are a crucial part of any successful socialmedia strategy.
- Community management focuses onuser retention and building brand loyalty with your existing customers.
- Social listening involveskeeping track of mentions or discussions about your organization or brand onvarious platforms.
Therefore, a brand should always respond to both positive andnegative comments and reviews to build a community of engaged followers whowill become your loyal brand advocates.Use tools like Buffer, Hootsuite, GoogleAlerts, and another social media monitoring tool to set up alerts for mentionsof your brand name, product names, branded hashtags and names of executives.
- Yourstrategy and tactics don't support your business objectives
Another mistake that people make while making a social mediastrategy is their strategy don't support their business objective.
For instance, a business objective for a brand that sells apparelsis to sell their new customizes t-shirt. As a result, their social mediastrategy is to create content for both paid and organic to direct customers totheir website to purchase customizes t-shirt. With a social media strategy inplace to support its business objectives, they can now implement severalspecific tactics, such as increasing web traffic to blog posts that demonstratedifferent customize t-shirts for winters. Finally, now that the tactics havebeen defined, the company can create social posts that will help them achievetheir business objectives.
So before creating any social media content make sure your tactic iswithin your social media strategy which supports your business.
- Nottracking key performance indicators (KPI's) weekly, monthly, or quarterly
The only way to measure the success of your social media strategy isto regularly measure your KPIs to determine which tactics are working, andwhich ones aren't.
Track performance on a weekly, monthly, or quarterly basis. Weeklyreports can help identify the content types your customers engage with themost, and content or topics they are more likely to respond to. These are someof these key metrics you should track every week:
- Growth of the followers – How manyfollowers you gained in last week
- Engagement – The number of usersinteracting with your content
- Reach – Number of users who saw yourcontent
- Clicks – How many users click on yourpost
- Conversions – How many users complete aspecified action–like sign up for a newsletter, read your blog post, made apurchase, etc.
Tracking your monthly report as it will help you to identify thesigns of growth like new followers, engagement and conversion. Monthly performancereports can also help identify trends that can help you to shape your overallsocial strategy, like identifying the best times and days to post for maximumengagement.
