Why does social media marketing matter? Should you do it? These are the most important questions if you want to expand your marketing reach and connect with far more people than you ever have before. Social media is a powerful tool of mass communication. It not only allows for a mass audience, but it is also a kind of connection that is highly personalized. When a potential customer sees an ad on TV, it might be tailored to their choice of channel, but it is most often highly impersonal. On social media on the other hand, customer information derived from the pages they follow and the connections they make with other users can all be factored into who sees your ad.
In short, social media is how you connect with your ideal customers and grow an audience of people interested in what you have to offer. Engaged Media, a company specializing in social media strategy, say, however, that getting social media marketing just right is far from easy. You can pour money into the challenge, but that will not necessarily endow your social media marketing with the kind of pinpoint precision that brings you into contact with exactly the right people. And make no mistake, social media is the best place for that to happen.
What is Social Media Strategy?
You can think of social media strategy as a detailed blueprint for a brand’s social media activity that answers certain questions. Not the ones that were given at the start of this article (you can probably tell already that the answer to those are “yes”). Instead, social media strategies answer the all-important when, how, and why for every piece of content you post on social media.
The important thing about social media strategy is that it starts before you even post anything. You need to think long term and plan out just how you will reach not only a large audience, but the right audience as well.
That, as it happens, is one of the most important things to consider when you begin to sketch out a workable social media strategy – who, exactly is your audience. Answering this question as thoroughly as possible will allow you to post your content in the right place, where it is more likely to be noticed, engaged with, and shared. This is how you get your brand out there to potentially millions of social media users.
Some further questions to consider when you begin to plan a social media strategy are:
- How do you want your brand to be perceived?
- What kind of content will you share (videos, pictures, text posts etc.)?
- What kind of social media platforms will work best for your brand?
- What are the goals and results that you want to achieve (bear in mind, however, that there is no end goal with social media marketing – the aim to just grow and grow).
Why You Need a Social Media Strategy
To better explain why you need a social media strategy, it is worth setting out just what it will do for you. One overarching point here is that many brands are now making use of social media to spread themselves far and wide. Failing to do so therefore, is a sure way to give the competition the edge right from the off.
Social media marketing is the way to control what individual users are saying about your brand, to make that digital word of mouth positive, and to make sure as many people as possible hear it. In the modern world of business, this is something you simply cannot do without.