If you’ve recently launched a small business, I already know that you’re a motivated, ambitious, and determined individual who wants to make the most significant impact possible on your industry!
But to be successful in today’s digital business landscape, having a properly planned social media strategy is not only important, but it’s also essential to the success of your small business.
However, the problem is that many aspiring entrepreneurs aren’t quite sure how to properly manage their social media accounts to reach their target audience.
In the following article, we’ll look at the essential components of a practical and effective social media strategy that you and your team can put into place today!
Do Your Research
Whether you’re a new company or an established brand, there’s nothing more important than doing a bit of market research before planning out the rest of your strategy.
Market and audience research helps you understand who your ideal customers are, where they spend their time online, and what type of content you should be posting to engage with them effectively.
There are many online tools and resources you can use to perform your market research.
Learning about your target audience and market ensures that you’ll make better decisions when planning and implementing your overall social media strategy.
Set SMART Goals
SMART goals are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timely.
Before you do things like create your social media calendar and start writing posts, it’s essential to set a few SMART goals to help provide even more direction to your strategy.
What do you want to achieve? Is it gaining more followers? More likes, comments, and engagement?
Whatever the case, make sure that you set goals that fall into these five categories.
An example of a SMART goal would be to gain 100 new Instagram followers per month for the next six months.
Create Your Accounts
Once you’ve performed your research and have set a few goals, it’s time to start creating your social media accounts.
Keep in mind that you won’t need to create accounts for every social platform out there.
When you do your market research, you’ll want to look into which platforms are most popular for your target audience. And then, get active solely on those platforms, rather than wasting your time and efforts trying to be involved everywhere.
Make sure to include as much business information as possible on your profile, including the name, website, location, and services or products offered by your small business.
Create A Social Media Calendar
Lastly, to finalize your social strategy, you’ll want to create a social media calendar.
Again, when you perform market research, you should look into when and how often your target audience is online and most active. Then, use this information to create your calendar.
Whether you post once a day, three times a day, or once per week, it doesn’t matter.
The critical thing to remember is to be regularly active and to adhere to your calendar at all times.
This helps your audience know when they can expect new content from you, which can help you get more followers and more engagement.
Stay Active And Succeed
Creating a social media strategy might seem complicated at first sight.
However, when you know your target audience, your goals and have a social media calendar to help back it all up, your strategy will pretty much fall right into place!
Just remember that being successful on social media isn’t about directly selling to your audience.
So rather than promoting your products or services directly, you want to do so by creating content and providing value to your audience, which will put you in a better position to make that next sale!
This article was written by Armando Santos
Featured Image Credits: Pixabay
