Is There Anybody Out There? – Social Media Marketing
If you have created your brand identity and strategy already, and are in the process of getting a website up and running, your next step would be to plan out your social media marketing strategy.
Social media marketing is using various social media platforms to connect with your audience on an ongoing basis – the goal is to build your brand, drive traffic to your website traffic and increase sales. In most cases, this usually involves:
- Posting or publishing engaging and share-worthy content on your profiles
- Interacting with, and listening to your followers
- Running social media advertisements
- Analyzing your results
At the moment, the major social media platforms are Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, Snapchat, Tumblr and Twitch. So whether you want to build a brand, increase your fans or grow your business, we at Beespoke can help you succeed.
The key element to success on social media is to have a comprehensive and well-thought out strategy – one that aligns with your brand values, brand image and tone of voice. Because let’s face it, thanks to social media, communication between brands and consumers is not just a 2-way street, it’s a mass medium – everybody can see what you’re talking about, and this can impact your brand in many ways.
Depending on your brand, your goals for social media could be slightly different than others. If you’re a business concerned with what people are saying about your brand, then you would monitor social media conversations and respond to relevant mentions (social media listening).
A business curious to know how it’s performing on social media would analyze engagement, reach, and sales conversion through social media and social media analytics.
A business that would want to reach a specific target audience at larger scale, or re-target website visitors would run highly-targeted social media advertising.
Some key questions to ask as far as your social media management planning stage occurs
- What is the end-goal for your social media?
- Who is your target audience?
- What are you going to share?
- Where are you going to share?
- When are you going to share?
At Beespoke, we work with a 5 Node Framework of Social Media
1. Strategy
The first step is to think about your social media strategy.
What are your goals? How can an effective social media strategy help you achieve your business goals? Are you looking to increase your brand awareness, or for driving website traffic and sales? Social media can help drive engagement and attention around your brand, create a community of like-minded followers, and also serve as a customer support medium for you.
Which social media platforms should you focus on? The sheer number of platforms is enough to give anyone anxiety attacks. When starting out, we recommend that you pick a few platforms where your target audience is most likely to be, and take it from there.
What type of content should you post? What type of content would your target audience resonate with best? Is it images, videos, blog posts or links? Is it informative, educational or entertaining content? A good place to start is to look at the persona created in the Supreme Brand Story, which will help you answer these questions.
And how your social media posts perform will always dictate what you focus more on, and your strategy adapts with time.
2. Planning and Publishing
With almost three billion people using social media, you need to be where your audience is, in order to create an impact and be heard and by current, and future customers.
Social Media publishing is as simple as sharing a blog post, a video, or an image, on your chosen social media platform.
But you want to strategize and plan your content ahead of time instead of creating and publishing content spontaneously – although there are exceptions to the rule about spontaneity. Also, to ensure maximum reach, you need to publish likeable and shareable content that your audience will respond to favorably, at the right timing and frequency.
3. Social Listening and Engagement
As your digital presence and following grows, online conversations about your brand will also increase. People will tag you in their social media posts, comment on your posts, or message you directly with questions or feedback – praise as well as complaints.
People might even talk about your brand on social media without ‘tagging’ you. So you need to have a social listening strategy and the tools in place to keep an eye on your brand health on social media. If it’s praise or positive feedback, you have a chance to engage with them, and even surprise and delight them. Conversely, you can offer support, help or correct a situation before it gets worse.
Beespoke employs various social media listening and engagement tools that aggregate all your social mentions and messages, even including posts that haven’t tagged you.
4. Analytics
With all of this planning and effort, you want to know how your social media marketing is performing: what works better? Which days are more engaging? Do images get a higher reaction to videos? What type of posts are being shared more? Number of followers? Are you reaching more people compared to previous months? How many positive mentions did you get? How many negative mentions were there? How many people used your brand’s hashtag on their social media posts?
While each social media platform has its own dashboard to give you an individual performance report, we prefer to use a wider range of specialized social media analytic tools to get in-depth data and information not just per platform, but also to easily compare across multiple platforms.
5. Advertising
While social media posting and creating a digital community is great, limited attentions spans and the vast amount of content people see online inevitably means that at some point, your voice may not be heard by everyone. That is when you need to consider social media advertising as a means to amplify your brand messaging, not just to your current followers, but to a prospective audience as well
Targeting techniques of social media advertising are so powerful and precise, that you can specify exactly who gets to see your ads – a curated target audience based on demographics, interests, behaviors, and even whether they follow your competition. For social media advertising, Beespoke uses a dedicated digital marketing team that plans and manages entire campaigns, using a variety of tools to make bulk changes, automate processes, and optimize your ads and media spend.
