Tips to Build a Social Media Strategy Which Works

Despite the fairly informal mode of communication that prevails on it, social media is a powerful tool and needs a strategy as far as business is concerned. As with any strategy, you need it to be:

· Effective,

· Dynamic,

· Result-oriented and

· Crafted rather than ad hoc.

Here are a few tips to build such a social media strategy.

Draw up a list of your goals and make them well defined and measurable. This list will then define how your social media should be used. Some of the goals could be:

· To improve customer engagement.

· Increase awareness of brand or

· Create brand awareness – both different things!

· Generate website traffic and so on.

You have to have fabulous content in order to make a mark in the world of social media. Further, your content has to be diverse, even as it deals with everything connected with your brand or business. Bring in:

· Well-known guest bloggers to write about and for you.

· Videos.

· Original images.

· Infographics.

Links to other high quality sites and so on.

You have to have a clear understanding of where your target market or audience is. Delve into details such as:

· Age.

· Income levels.

· Location and so on.

This will allow you to create your social media profile wisely too. For instance, if your product is aimed at working professionals, then you must be on LinkedIn is it not?

Where is your competition? What are they doing? Are they successful at it? How have they managed to attract and retain customers? By being on Facebook or by being on Reddit? This again, has to be a detailed analysis because you will learn their strengths and weaknesses and identity any gaps that you can plug in your own social media strategy as well.

Once you have delved into the details above, you also need to structure your communications. Should you be informal on one social channel and formal on the other? What is the kind of conversation that you must enter into and so on.

Finally, it is very important to audit your social media strategy periodically. Thanks to the many online tools that help you audit performance, you can and you must measure the ROI on each of your social media channels and make course corrections too.

Keep these tips in mind and you will have a solid social media strategy in place.