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Social Media Marketing Guide
Nowadays, it seems that everybody claims to be an expert in social media marketing strategies.
However, it’s one thing to manage your social media platforms at a user level, but a completely different animal when it comes to following a social media marketing strategy and creating content.
If you want to create a social media strategy from scratch, or become a social media professional, we have prepared a treasure map or checklist that you can follow to pass from user level to ‘Pro’.
Make sure to take notes or save this article in your Favorites folder for a handy reference.
Now, let’s get down to business.
Who Develops A Social Media Strategy?
First, you need to determine what your role is within the social media pyramid:
Are you a Community Manager or a Social Media Manager?
You must have your tasks well defined to understand what your role is.
And decide if you are born to be a Community Manager or a Social Media Manager.
There are multiple professional categories within the social media sphere. In an ideal world these categories would be:
📌 Social Media Strategist
This is the person responsible for developing the social media strategy step by step and deciding the methodology behind the tactics and marketing efforts.
📌 Social Media Manager
SMM’s are those in charge of organizing and implementing the strategy within the team.
📌 Community Manager
This role is in charge of uploading content and executing the social media strategy under the social media manager supervision.
📌 Content Curator
This person is responsible for researching topics, staying up-to-date with social media, and communicating this across social networks.
“In the real world, the limits are not clear and you will often have to assume all four roles or parts of them”
This is why it’s so important to know how to carry out a social media strategy if you work in this industry.
How to Develop your Social Media Marketing Strategy Step- Sy-Step
First Step: RESEARCH
First, you must know the rules of the game and analyze the board before you start planning.
To do so, you should observe and research how social networks work in order to ask the right questions. And, you must conduct research on your competitors, and see what is working for them.
This way you will get the right answers that will help you to design your strategy.
Game Board → Social Networks
✅ Question 1
How many social media platforms are there and which ones are relevant to my brand?
It seems that Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Twitter (X), YouTube, Threads, Linkedln, and Pinterest, and Snapchat are the current leading networks.
However, depending on the service or product that you offer and the geographical area where you work, Google My Business might amaze you with unimaginable results.
So, before you make any decision based on what the crowds do…
Stop and analyze all the social media channels available in depth.
Otherwise, you might disregard a social media channel that could bring you great results.
Write down the most adequate social media channels for your brand according to your analysis and then continue with the question-asking!
✅ Question 2
Where are my social media competitors?
Now it’s time to analyze your competitors.
Discover which strategies they are applying to the social media game.
You will get lucrative conclusions:
⚡ Ideas to inspire your strategy, or to make a thorough SWOT analysis.
⚡ Compare results to view what has, and hasn’t worked
⚡ Find blind spots in your social media marketing strategy to avoid recurring mistakes.
⚡ Discover new prospective customers. If they buy from your competitors, why aren’t they going to buy from you?
In short, analyzing your social media competitors will help you to design your own strategy and always be alert.
Add the result of your social media competitors analysis to your briefing and advance in your checklist.
✅ Question 3
How do top companies use social media?
Let’s be honest.
Big advertising agencies have more staff and resources to help successfully execute social media marketing strategies.
Even if you are not one of them, you can learn from them.
⚡ Discover which social media channels they use and how they do it.
⚡ Check their posting frequency and which format they use.
⚡ Find out how much money they invest in advertising and which social media channels they use to make promotions.
How do you do this?
Don’t worry, Metricool has already done it for you.
Read our last social media study where we analyze business accounts and their strategies.
Now that you’ve learned some important strategies, it’s time to put them into business!
✅ Question 4
What do users say about your brand?
Your brand might not be on social media yet, but that doesn’t mean users aren’t talking about you, or other topics in your industry.
This question is extremely important because this will help you understand your customers, find out what they are looking for, and how they prefer it.
The best way to analyze and discover what users are saying about your brand is through social listening.
Social listening will allow you to know:
⚡Understand customer and client impressions and feedback.
⚡Topics they are most interested in.
⚡How they found you, and if they continue to come back.
⚡What their pain-points are and what they expect from you.
To put social monitoring into practice for your brand or business, you need to have the right tools
These social listening tools will help you find out what people are saying about your brand online using keywords. Keep track of information and respond to messages and comments from the platform:
In addition to social listening, with social monitoring, you can have an overview of whats happening on social media.
Combining these two strategies can help you improve the reputation and position of your brand.
➡️ Find out what social monitoring is and how it differs from social listening ⬅️
Now you have all the information that will help your research.
If you skip this part, it is impossible to draw a successful social media marketing strategy.
So, keep all this info and conclusions in a safe place and let’s go to the next step.
Second Step: Draw A Plan
If we emulate the legendary A-team Hannibal’s famous quote:
“I love it when a plan comes together”
It reminds us that we must have a plan.
If you want to execute your plan successfully, you first have to build it.
SOCIAL MEDIA PLAN
Now use everything you have learned from your research and mix it with the knowledge you have about your brand.
Then, it’s time to start drawing your social media plan so you can complete your social media marketing strategy.
Objectives
Define the generic objectives for your brand. These could be things such as:
⚡ Establish branding.
⚡ Capture users.
⚡ Improve reputation.
⚡ Drive traffic to website.
Strategies
Link each objective to one or several strategies. That is, decide what you are going to do to reach your goals and how long this will take.
Example: Establish Branding
Objective
→ Increase brand awareness. Increase follower count 20% and improve social media engagement by 15% in two months.
Strategies
→ Advertise on Facebook and retarget users that visit the website. This is a way to make an impression on users and resonate with an audience that is already interested.
→ Work with micro-influencers on Twitter to reach more people who don’t know the brand yet.
→ Start a conversation with users on Twitter, run polls, share resources, etc.
SOCIAL MEDIA CONTENT PLAN
Once you have defined your social media plan and the social media marketing strategy, this will help you to accomplish your goals, and allow you to start planning!
The content plan is guide to help you to decide what should and shouldn’t be posted, so therefore it’s important to use a content calendar for social media.
If you still have more doubts about how to carry out this step, here is a guide on how to make a detailed content plan for social networks.
In this document you should determine:
- The posting frequency on each social network.
- The topics to share.
- The type of content.
- The frequency.
Also, you must determine who is going to do these actions: You, a team member, a team, etc. and create an editorial plan for your company’s blog.
A social media plan and a content plan combined are vital to ensure a successful strategy for your social media. But there is a third plan that is crucial.
↪️ How to curate content for social media ↩️
CRISIS PLAN
We can’t control everything.
Having a crisis plan for social media means being ready for any disaster that your community might face.
Without this plan it is complicated to fight social media trolls, account frauds, or other attacks on your profile.
Be careful, there are many fake profiles posing as real people, but are actually bots. That’s why we have an article that tells you perfectly how to detect fake profiles on social networks.
The best tip:
You should prepare a crisis protocol beforehand to react fast and smart.
Third step: EXECUTION
SOCIAL MEDIA PLANNING
The moment of executing the strategy has arrived and to do so, you can use the help of social media planning tools.
⚡ These tools allow you to know the best time to post on social media, that is, to see when your audience is active.
⚡ You can schedule your content to automatically post for you with social media planners.
⚡ They help you to get the most out of your time and not leave anything up to chance.
⚡ Forget about Excel templates and have all the live data in hand.
⚡ 5 ways to use social media to enhance project management.
⚡ Social Media Manager Calendar 2023 to keep track of all the important dates in your social networks.
Some tips
Keep this document handy:
✅ Use the right dimensions for your images and videos
If an image has poor-quality or is highly pixelated, it’s doomed to fail.
Knowing the correct dimensions, and aspect radio is important to optimize your content across different social media platforms, and help reach more users.
→ The size of your images on social media ←
🔽
Run out of content? Don’t worry, Metricool has a free image bank, so you can choose from high-quality content that is royalty free.
✅ Use emojis carefully
The use of emojis highlights can your posts. However, if you don’t use them correctly, this can come off as poorly planned, and lacking quality.
So check out the article above to learn how to use them properly and in which social networks you should include them.
→ How to use emojis in your social media content ←
✅ Shorten URLs you share
URLs shorteners are great allies to help you extract valuable data from the users that click them.
Data is like gold on social media.
✅ Share content from third parties [sharing is caring]
Content curation is a strategy itself. It’s crucial to know what type of content your audience wants and from who.
Creating quality content helps keep your social media accounts alive and share content that interests your users.
✅ Create contests
It will improve your social networking account engagement and increase your visibility.
→ Learn how to make contests in social networks here ←
→ Learn how to maximize social media contest responses ←
✅ Use mobile apps for you daily work
You’ve most likely had a work emergency that caught you off-guard away from your desk: a picture that you didn’t post correctly or a post that you didn’t schedule at the right time. Working as a social media manager keeps you on your toes.
Fortunately for you, there’s a huge range of apps for social media on the market for any situation so that you can keep on top of your social media work: for designing, managing content, editing videos, etc.
→ 10 essentials apps for social media managers←
✅ Use AI to help with captions, copy, etc.
Another resource to create more content, is to use an AI tool to help generate content. Plus, you can repurpose your content, with a new twist. You can use Metricool’s AI text generator.
By telling AI what you are looking for, or by using your old copy, you can create new copy and even generate ideas for content in the future.
Google Chrome Extensions for Social Media
Chrome extensions are a great tool for social media managers’ work lives.
There’s a huge range of features to get the most out of your time and help you focus on other tasks while they do the work for you.
MEASURE RESULTS
Sprinters didn’t improve their running times until they started measuring them. So, if you want to be the Usain Bolt of social media you must start tracking your results.
With Metricool you can get all the relevant social media metrics to understand what’s going on and discover which strategies work best.
Data that you should consider
Although with Metricool you have access to a wide variety of information, you should especially pay attention to these two metrics:
Engagement
With this metric, you will discover how much your followers love you. The best indicator of all is knowing who is interacting with you, and how.
This translates into a loyal audience, willing to recommend your brand, buy your products, or speak highly of your company.
So, take care of your engagement and don’t forget to include it in your social media marketing strategy.
➡️ How to measure engagement ⬅️
ROI: Return of Investment
In contrast with engagement, this metric is the favorite amongst business people: the economic profit.
ROI is the benefit that the company receives after the investments in resources, money, and time into social media efforts.
➡️ Understanding social media ROI and how to measure it ⬅️
Reach vs impressions
What is the difference between reach and impressions?
Impressions is the number of times people have seen your posts, and reach is the total number of unique people who have seen your content.
▶️ Reach vs Impressions, Defined ◀️
Message and comment management
Your community is everything for your social networks. Without them there are no interactions, no impressions, no reach… nothing!
That’s why it’s important to keep in touch with the users that reach out via comments, reactions, or DMs.
Manage all these interactions so as not to leave a comment without replying or without giving like, solve doubts or thank any review.
⚡️ How to manage social media messages
CREATE A SOCIAL MEDIA REPORT
We have arrived to the last part of the social media marketing process.
Now it is time to create a report with the periodical performance of your strategy and with all the metrics and results.
This report is very valuable for you and your client or brand. With a report:
⚡ You can track the evolution of your strategy.
⚡ You can discover who follows you, how many new followers you have acquired, and how your content is performing.
⚡ You can show all your work and their outcomes.
⚡ You can view the history of your results.
Without this report your strategy would be incomplete. You wouldn’t know how your work and your social media marketing plan has evolved.
Other Social Media Marketing Strategy Tips
You can get better results if you use the data from your social media strategy along with other disciplines.
This could be a competitive advantage over your competitors.
So don’t miss this bonus track.
NETWORKING AND SOCIAL MEDIA
In my opinion, networking is one of the most important actions in any marketing strategy.
This strategy consists of connecting with professionals in your industry, to collaborate and create effective synergies for both parties.
In this case, establishing links with social media marketing professionals can benefit us when it comes to experience improvements in our professional activity:
SEO and Social media
Does social media improve the SEO of your website?
The answer is yes, indirectly.
A good social media marketing strategy should consider which steps must be followed to improve the ranking of your brand’s website.
This is why is so important that you read this document where we show you what to do to improve the SEO and include it in your plan.
Conduct a Social Media Audit
If you already have social profiles, you can choose to do a social media audit to find out where your accounts stand. And make a plan based on that data.
Check out this webinar with Rachel Pedersen, where we run through the most essential steps to audit your social media account:
Email Marketing
How do you encourage and drive traffic towards your social media accounts with email marketing?
If you have a database with information about people interested in your brand, you have the treasure.
Email marketing with leads is the perfect ally to increase the number of conversions and other positive benefits for your social media channels such as:
⚡ Increase the number of followers on your social media accounts.
⚡ Retarget people on your list through social media.
⚡ Give visibility to your social media campaigns.
⚡ Promote strategic hashtags for your brand.
Copywriting
So, you have worked hard on the visual content that you are planning to share on social media.
You have analyzed your competitors and you have designed an outstanding social media marketing strategy.
Are you forgetting anything?
Yes, copywriting.
Copywriting helps you to persuade social media followers through your content or capture the attention of potential followers that haven’t hit the follow button yet.
This persuasive writing technique will give you extra points to stand out from the rest, increase your followers and get more interactions.
⚡️ Discover how to use copywriting on social media and the number of characters in each social network.
Personal Branding
It seems that when we talk about brands we refer to big companies exclusively.
A brand can be personal, for example a public figure, an influencer, or someone like you and me.
Social media is essential to boost a personal brand and a social media marketing strategy is crucial for both big companies or personal brands.
You can start to build your reputation, and promote any of your upcoming releases, events, and successes.
I hope this social media marketing guide has helped to organize your social media strategies, so you’re ready to attack with full confidence.
Other things good to know:
▶️ Actions that you must avoid on social media
▶️ Biggest social media mistakes
▶️ Benefits of social media for small businesses
▶️ Why all businesses need social media
▶️ How social media can bolster your business
▶️ Why your social media ads are not working
▶️ How to generate app download through social media
▶️ How to boost your sales strategy with Whatsapp and social networks
Now you can say: “I love it when a plan comes together”
Any questions?
Let us know in the comment section.