Building a Successful Social Media Strategy

With social media now so integrated into our daily lives, social media management is one of our most popular services that we offer to clients. It can offer an excellent return on investment and allows you to build and engage with a relevant audience on a regular basis. This will help to keep your brand front of mind when your target customer is ready to buy.

Often social media management will be delegated to a team member who has lots of other responsibilities as well. Social media marketing can be easily underestimated as lots of people use social media in their personal lives and understand how to create and add content, however it is creating content that is appropriate for your brand and resonates with your target audience that can be the tricky part.

If you have been managing your social media channels yourself but engagement is currently low, you could use some of our tips in this article to help…

Identify which channels your audience are on

Firstly, it might seem obvious, but doing some research into which channels your customers are actively using and engaging with brands like yours will help you define where to centre your efforts.

Identify key messages and themes that will resonate and encourage engagement and interaction

If you are struggling to think of new content ideas, it helps to have a core framework of key messages that you want your audience to understand about your brand. These are usually based around your value proposition and key selling points.

Referring back to these core themes will help you ensure the ideas you are generating are in line with your wider strategy and relevant for both your brand and audience.

Understanding key trends and hot topics

Really getting under the skin of your customer interests and knowing the trends forming in your industry well helps you contribute to conversations online.

Not all of your content has to be curated and planned in advance, keeping an eye on relevant news channels, competitor social media channels and influencer channels allows you to identify quickly what the hot relevant topics are of the day and contribute to the conversation quickly. It shows you are at the forefront of your industry and have your finger on the pulse.

Define your tone of voice

A consistent tone of voice helps people to recognise your brand content. You need to consider what tone of voice is appropriate for your brand – is it fun and excited?

• It is quite corporate and authoritative?
• Do you inject some humour?
• Is it casual and friendly?

Think about the kind of language that you use… Does it reflect the language of your audience?

If you have multiple people contributing to creating content on your channels this is particularly important to define and communicate to the team to help align their efforts.

Consider your imagery

It can be tempting to use Google to find images, or search for stock images that feel relevant to your story, but the reality is that people want to see behind the scenes of your brand. They want to see your product, services being delivered, your premises, your brand assets and most importantly in many cases – your people! Remember – people connect with and do business with people so don’t be shy.

Try to capture plenty of images and videos on your smart phone when you have the opportunity so that you have a library in advance. Imagery doesn’t have to be overly polished for social media but do give some consideration to your lighting and framing your shots well.

Audience interaction

It’s key that you are ready and prepared to respond to your audience interactions within a reasonable timeframe. You might find that you can pick up on queries and questions and convert your audience to customers by helping them get answers quickly. This is particularly important in the initial few hours after you have posted new content. It can be hard to monitor your platforms continually when you have other responsibilities, so consider delegating this to a specialist if you find you have a number of queries and interactions but do struggle to respond to them all quickly.

Hopefully giving some consideration to these points will help give you some inspiration, but if not, we can put together a strategy for you and take ownership of delivering it so that you can invest your time and energy in the places where you can get the best result from it.

For more information about our social media marketing services email kathryn@conceptcommunications.co.uk.