6 Essential Steps to Build A Successful Social Media Strategy


What kind of social media strategy to apply to develop a successful business?

90% of social media users operate the platforms to reach out to brands. This huge number makes social media become the core of business marketing. Thus, to maximize the function of social media for your business, you need to construct a solid social media strategy.

Creating an effective social media strategy

1.   Ask yourself why your business should be on social media

To start designing your social media strategy, ask yourself the goals for developing this. Simon Sinek in his book “Start With Why” provides a framework called the Golden Circle.

There, you can see that the center of this circle is WHY. The WHY is the reason that people will buy your product as it also matches your WHY.

First thing first, align with your business goals. Below are some examples of business goals that can give inspiration to your WHY

  • Improve the brand. It means you want to build your brand awareness by growing your audience and expanding social media targeting. One way to generate more audiences is by creating valuable content using specific keywords and hashtags. 
  • Develop more engagement from audiences. Turning your viewers into a walking promoter is different from increasing the number of audiences. Here, you focus on developing the community so that your current followers are willing to recommend your brand.
  • Increase your conversion rate. A conversation rate is the percentage of visitors who are eager to take the desired action such as registering a membership, filling a form, or subscribing to your newsletter.
  • Provoke sales and leads. Sales and leads are strongly related to direct more money to your bank account. Your audiences are not by accident clicking to the buy button in the marketplace after looking at your social media, right?

2.   Know who your target audience is

Whatever your goal is, the next key step is getting to know your audiences. B2B and B2C have a different kind of audience, for example. Work on your data showing what kind of buyers that were attracted to your products. If you do not have any, glance your competitors.

After that, you create your audience personas to help you direct correctly on the specified target audience. Alfred Lua, a product marketer at Buffer, suggested that you answer the following 5W+1H questions to build an ideal customer.

  • Who are your audiences? Focus on what their job, age, gender, location, and salary are.
  • What are they interested in? Consider what you can do for them like providing entertainment, product descriptions, or educational content.
  • Where do they spend their time? As we are talking about social media strategy, think about which social media they usually scroll on.
  • When do they see your content? This will help you at what time you should upload on your social media.
  • Why do they want to look at your content? Do you remember the WHY principle above? Match your audiences’ WHY and connect it with yours.
  • How do they enjoy the content? Is it by reading an article, watching a video, or looking at social media photos? Think about it!

Having a list of audience personas will assist you in the next steps.

3.   Decide your social media

There is a bunch of social media for business out there, you can name YouTube, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Remember that you only need to be active on 1 to 2 platforms because you will be overwhelmed if you target every platform.

Review your audience persona before deciding which social networking platforms to use. For instance, over 67 percent of Pinterest users are women, if your business is related to women’s stuff like food, beauty, or fashion products, you are strongly recommended to publish content on Pinterest.

4.   Pick the measurement

Brian Tracy, a business trainer from Canada, stated that your goals must be SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound), hence you have to choose the right tools to measure whether your social media strategy is successful.

Some call this social media metrics. These make your goal measurable and data-driven since creating an assumption is a sin in digital marketing. There are some important metrics that reflect on the mentioned goals.

  • Awareness. To notice whether you succeed in constructing brand awareness is by looking at the number of followers, shares, and reach. Why should those metrics? Building brand awareness is about extending your horizon. The growth of your followers will show that you get new potential customers.
  • Engagement. It means that your audiences see your content interesting. You can see how many people like and comment on your posts. If it is sharable, your viewers may tag or mention you on their own posts.
  • Conversions. The success of conversions can be seen by the number of people click your website, register their email addresses, or subscribe to your newsletter.
  • Sales. Count how many products have been sold and whether your customers write testimonials for your brand.

5.   Create attractive content

After starting with WHY, knowing the audience, deciding social media, and choosing the right metric, it is time to be creative with your content!

Prior to making content, match your audience’s interest first. What type of content they like and in what way they enjoy the content. Next, gather the inspiration and convert it into content that is ready to upload. Make a content calendar to help you consistently create a post.

Use a plot mix, meaning that you cannot upload the same type of content like sales or information over and over. Apply 80-20 rule of marketing that is 80 percent of your content should contain information, entertainment, and education to your viewers. And, 20 percent of it can be used to promote your product.

6.   Reflect and review what works and what does not

There will be some errors when you try to undergo a social media strategy. Therefore, jot down the mistakes you have made so that you will not replay the same mistakes.

Evaluate in which step you do it wrong, and fix it in your next strategy.Applying social media strategy is easier said than done. It is continuous learning that its results cannot be seen overnight! Learn the practical steps above by directly doing it so that you can get exposed by what really happens on social media.