How to Create an Effective Social Media Strategy for 2018

by Ace Concierge | Virtual Assistant | Jan 10, 2018 | Guest Blogger, Small Business, Social Media

To successfully promote your business with social media, you need a strategy in place. A well-built strategy provides your business with a path that works. It also makes it easy to measure results and check if what you are doing is working or if you need to make changes.

Therefore, in this post I am going to show you how to create an effective social media strategy for 2018. Read my tips and implement them to ensure you get positive results from your social media marketing in the new year…

Choose goals:

A strategy only works if it is results oriented. Hence, before you create your strategy you need to choose goals. For example, if you are running a business the main goals of your social media strategy should be to generate more revenue or things that contribute to boosting revenue like traffic and leads.

Most people make the mistake of choosing apex goals like increasing engagement and followers. These goals are important too and should be part of your strategy, but they shouldn’t be your apex goals. Only have apex goals that have a direct impact on your revenue. After that begin choosing the secondary goals that can have an impact on your apex goals.

Research your audience, social networks and competitors:

Once you know your goals you need to conduct plenty of research to learn as much as you can about your audience. For this you should conduct interviews and surveys.

Conduct social media research

Also, checkout the latest social media demographics research put out by credible organisations like Pew.

Once you know your audience and the networks they use you should conduct research on the social networks they are most active on. Next figure out which ones you would like your business to be active on.

Once you know the social networks you want to use you can learn the best practices and use social media analytics tools to spy on your competitors. See what type of content they create and how it is working for them.

Practice visual content creation skills:

If you look at the fastest growing social networks right now (Pinterest, Instagram and Snapchat) you will realise that they are very visual centric (you can only post visuals on these networks). Also, if you checkout recent research on established networks like Facebook you will see that images drive the highest engagement here.

This is why you should invest plenty of your time to learn as much as you can about creating visual content. This should include understanding basic design principles and the types of images that fare well on different networks.

Once you understand this, creating great visual content shouldn’t be a problem as there plenty of online visual editors that make the process of design easy. They come with premade templates and design ideas too.

Create social media visuals

A company that certainly understand the importance of visual content is Whole Foods. Make sure you checkout their Pinterest and Instagram pages to gain some inspiration.

Incorporate blogging and other content:

Building a social presence with engaging content is an important step, but along with this you must share content from your blog. This lets you transfer some of the engagement onto your blog where you will have the opportunity to convert traffic to leads and sales.

Write longer posts

For best results you should step away from creating short blog posts as a study by Buzzsumo found that long posts between 3,000 and 10,000 words get the most shares. But make sure the entire post is filled with quality information. Just beefing up a blog post with filler content won’t do.

Write long top quality posts

An example of a quality post is Social Media Marketing Made Simple by Neil Patel. It is over 3,000 words long, but every inch of it is filled with quality information.

You should publish long posts like this a few times a week. But if you are pressed for time try you can write them once a week or once every 2 weeks.

Along with the blog post create other forms of content like ebooks, white papers and webinars that can convert blog traffic into leads.

Regularly modify your strategy:

No matter how carful you are with the initial research, you won’t set up the perfect strategy in your first attempt. On top of that industry trends change and social networks are redesigned with the introduction of new features. Hence, you should use a good analytics tool to regularly analyse your strategy and make any modifications if necessary.

Gradually you will be able to build the perfect social media strategy. Of course, you will need to make modifications every few months as trends and features change.

Now go and set up your strategy for the new year…

These are all the steps you must follow while creating an effective social media strategy for 2018. Start by choosing your goals and gathering as much data as you can on your audience and the social network they frequent. Next spy on your competitors and see what’s working for them.

After that get active and begin creating visual content and blog content that will help you accomplish your business goals. And don’t forget to regularly analyse your results and determine if what you are doing is working.

Guest Author

Mitt Ray is the founder of Social Marketing Writing, where you can download 100 free social media background images.