Five questions to help you build a social media strategy
Don’t know where to start on social media? Or not seeing the results you want from it? Discover five questions you need to ask to build a social media strategy.
Many freelancers and small business owners know they should be posting on social media, but don’t have the time or even the knowledge about what, when or how to post.
And which platform should they even be on?! There is so much out there to choose from, and not enough time to be everywhere at once.
That’s why you need a social media strategy. So you can clearly understand what you want from social media – and how to best use your time to achieve it. And to help you get one, Louise Brogan from Social Bee NI is sharing five questions you need to ask.
Five questions to help you build a social media strategy
If you can answer these five questions about your business, you can use them to build your own social media strategy and start getting results for your online marketing efforts:
- What is the purpose for your business using social media?
- What are your goals?
- Where are your ideal clients
- What are your themes of your business?
- What will you post about?
To help you answer these questions as easily and accurately as possible, let’s tackle each one in turn.
1) What is the purpose of using social media in your business?
Decide what you want to use social media for. Are you going to use it to drive people to your website? Do you have YouTube explanation videos you want to share with people?
Do you want to establish yourself as an expert in your field? Do you want to promote your products or services? Or is your aim to direct people to your bricks and mortar premises?
When you understand why you are on social media, you can get a clearer idea of what you should be doing.
2) What are your goals?
Many people who are using social media get caught up in the numbers game. They are so focussed on trying to reach 1,000 likes, 2,000 followers, and 150 views of their Facebook live, that it becomes all about the numbers.
Of course, growing your audience is vital to growing your business – but you need to make sure that you are attracting the RIGHT audience!
An Instagram account with 200 engaged followers who regularly comment on your posts is worth far more than an account with 2,000 followers who only comment now and again.
Anyone can spend money on paid advertising to grow the number of likes on their Facebook page. But if, for example, you are promoting bookkeeping on your Facebook page, and your audience are not small business owners, then you are wasting your time and money.
3) Where are your ideal clients hanging out online?
I recommend that small business owners and entrepreneurs try to initially focus on one or two social media platforms. So if you are going to try to engage with your ideal client online, you need to find out where they are!
LinkedIn is great for making professional and B2B connections, while Twitter is great for connecting with other business owners. (If you can get yourself up to speed with tweeting, try and find a local Twitter hour to really build relationships with others in your industry or local area.)
Facebook, meanwhile, works across both B2B and B2C industries – it’s all about finding your ideal client once you are on there.
4) What are the themes of your business marketing?
In order to attract those ideal clients, you need to think about what your message or themes are going to be in your social media strategy.
Rather than adopting the spray’n’pray approach, instead identify five key themes in your business. This way you can create content to post across social media that will appeal to your ideal client.
For example, if you work in the health and wellbeing industry your key themes could be health and wellness, healthy eating, mindfulness, exercise and stress reduction.
Your themes don’t need to be set in stone – in fact, if you are using social media to its full potential, you’ll regularly check your metrics. Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics and Google Analytics are all great sources of information about what types of post and topic people are responding to best.
5) What will you post about?
Once you identify your themes you can start to create content, images, mini trainings and video topics for each one, that you know will appeal to your ideal client.
If you create a bank of blog posts, videos and images, you can reuse these over and over to keep attracting your audience.
But remember to engage with your audience too – don’t just sell to them. Give them value in your content and they will come back for more.
Louise Brogan is the owner of Social Bee NI, where she helps women entrepreneurs understand how to use online marketing to grow their business. You can ask find Social Bee NI on social media.
