Developing a solid social media management strategy takes time, patience, and lots of planning. Sometimes, you may need a little help deciding what direction to take your social media management in, and these tips can help point you in the right direction.

Set a SMART Goal

The concept of SMART goals has been around for years, and it is widely popular among businesses. SMART is an acronym for:

  • Specific: Make your goals simple, clear, and easy to define.
  • Measurable: You need to be able to measure your progress. In the social media world, this means you will be using your analytics to monitor the progress of your goals.
  • Achievable: Ask yourself if this goal is something that you can achieve with what you have.
  • Realistic: Can you reach your goals with what you currently have? If you find yourself saying too many times “I can make it if I can get…” you may want to evaluate exactly how realistic your goal is. You can, of course, have those goals for your big picture, but the SMART goals are smaller pieces of the puzzle.
  • Time-sensitive: You need to have a time frame when you set your goals. It can be a few weeks, months, or even a year away, but having that time frame in mind will help you keep your eye on the prize.

This system is easy to use and mapping out your goals like this will help you determine what your strategy should be and how you need to go about reaching those goals.

Quality

Since just about everyone is on social media these days, you need to curate quality posts that are unique and stand out in some way to get your audience’s attention. Your content needs to make your audience pause when they are doing their time-killing, zoned out scrolling through Facebook; you do not want something they just scroll past without even thinking about the content they just missed out on seeing.

In addition to creating content, you should also be sharing interesting content from others to help increase your presence. Make sure when you do you credit your sources or authors; this can help you build relationships with people in your industry.

Chatbots

Before the invention of chatbots, a social media manager had to take the time to respond to every message they received manually, which can be extremely time-consuming, especially for a larger business. To the relief of social media managers everywhere, chatbots were invented. They may not be perfect, but they can make your life so much easier.

You can create a chatbot in just a few minutes and program it to handle several questions about your business. If the question is too complicated for your chatbot, you can always step in and take over the conversation. Even if you have to do that sometimes, it is still much less time spent answering all of your messages on social media.

Charm Your Audience

If you are not engaging enough with your audience, you can lose their interest. Let’s say you posted a picture of your new office space, and several people complimented it. Take the time to thank them all for their kind words, and when possible, try to add a little more to that like “you’re so kind.” This is a little thing, but it is the little things that make the difference, and engaging on a more personal level like this will make your audience feel appreciated and want to engage with you further.

Advertising

To help you connect with your audience better, you need to look into paid advertising on both social media and Google. Figuring out how to shape your ads can be tricky since each platform has a different audience. The Pew Research Center conducts annual studies on social media use to determine the demographics for each social media platform, which you can utilize to help you shape your social media marketing.

Facebook Ads

Facebook Ads are a vital part of your advertising; when you put an advertising campaign together, there are three broad goals you can select from:

Awareness: You can build brand awareness or increase your reach

Consideration: This can get more traffic on your website, boost engagement, generate leads, and more.

Conversion: This can help you make sales and conversions and help drive traffic to your stores. However, Facebook has disabled the traffic to stores goal for the moment because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Google Ads

Google Ads are another important component of your advertising strategy. There are two different types of Google ads — paid search and AdWords.

When you Google something and there are text-based ads at the top of your query, you are looking at a paid search. Paid searches target specific keywords.

In AdWords, you bid on keywords and specific phrases that your target audience may use in a query, and the hope is that the ads will be included in the search results of related queries. When someone clicks on it, you are charged for that click, which is why this type of advertising is known as pay-per-click.

Branding

Your brand is who your company is as a whole, and that is what you are trying to sell on social media. People no longer just want to see your products; they want to see who your company is and why you do what you do. As a marketing consultant and bestselling author, Simon Sinek once put it, “People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.” This is completely true and exactly why branding needs to be in your digital marketing strategy.

It is important to stay consistent on all social media platforms for your brand. Use the same profile picture, keep your name the same on all channels — for example, don’t use “Brad” on Facebook but use “Bradley” on Twitter and Instagram, keep it all the same. Reach out to your audience, be honest and authentic. However, you decide to approach your branding, try to be yourself,  it will make your audience have more respect for you and make them continue coming back for more.