Just under half of social media marketers say that aligning social media strategy to business goals is their biggest challenge. That’s quite a lot when social media is the perfect tool for working towards your business objectives!
The issue is that a lot of organisations are on social media, just to be on social media. Whether the accounts were set up before the current team started, or you’re just experimenting with content, this is only your starting point.
To ensure your organisation stands out, you need to think about social media more strategically. But what do we mean by this?
The Difference Between Strategy & Tactics
Tactics refer to the things that you do on social media, which adapt to your circumstances and are influenced by your strategy. Every company on social media has tactics that they follow. These usually consist of guidelines that may not be written down but will follow a general theme.
Your strategy is more about why you do things the way you do on social media, and how you execute them. You form the decisions around your social media, which will create the basis of your strategy.
By outlining your strategy, you will keep your tactics consistent, and supportive of your social media and business goals.
How Can You Be More Strategic?
First of all, stop thinking that your social media strategy is only a document that you create once. That is a part of it, but being strategic on social media also involves a mindset shift! You need to start to think about your efforts on social media in a more strategic way. Implement five P’s to more strategic social media to get started on the journey to better social media performance!
Need help putting your initial strategy together? Check out our 12 steps to a social media strategy!
Set a Purpose
It’s easy to fall into the trap of posting on social media just to post something. While it’s good that you’re active, without a clear goal, you can never be sure that you’re not wasting your time.
Set yourself at most 3 SMART targets for your social media. By getting specific about your goals, you can define what you’re using social media for, and what you want to achieve. A side bonus is that by setting your own measurable goals for social media, you can prioritise your workload and give you the power to say “no” to tasks that aren’t supporting your goals. Goodbye workload stress!
Identify Your People
Your content will never interest every single person; by trying to speak to everyone, you’ll talk to no one. Create tailored content for a specific audience rather than trying to write generalised nonsense.
Think about your dream client. What do they follow you for, and what content do they want to see from you? By identifying your audience and creating content for them, you’ll get more meaningful engagement in return.
Craft Your Proposition
Remember: it’s social, not corporate media! Don’t talk only about how amazing your products are and why your audience should buy them. If you met a stranger at a party and all they did was talk about themselves, how soon would it be before you snuck out the bathroom window?
Understand the topic that you and your audience have in common. Use that topic to create a sense of identity and community that people feel good to be a part of. If you’re a mattress company, craft content around sleep instead of your mattresses. People love getting a good night’s sleep, so content that helps them to do that will leave them more engaged in what you have to say.
Define Your Personality
A lot of organisations say that they want their social media to be ‘friendly’ and ‘more human’;but you need to go deeper. What sort of human do you want to be like; a thought-leader, comedian or a problem-solver?
Cut through the noise on social media by making conscious choices about your brand’s personality. You don’t have to do all the work yourself though! Use one or two of the twelve Jungian archetypes to craft your character and define your tone of voice on social media.
Decide Your Places
Each social media platform has its own culture, expectations and nuances. Posting identical content across all your channels won’t be engaging enough! Tailor your content to the platform you’re posting on to be present and authentic to your audience.
With the changing engagement levels on Facebook pages, many are turning to groups to create tighter communities. Like your channels, your Facebook group needs different content compared to your page. Groups tend to be more intimate spaces than pages, so think of your group as a back garden and your page as a front garden. Your page is nicely manicured, showing off the best of your gardening abilities. Your back garden has a swimming pool; because you wouldn’t want to go swimming in your front garden, would you?
Sometimes getting started is the biggest challenge, so use these ideas to start thinking about social media more strategically. If you want to first define your whole social media strategy before beginning to put it into practice, check out our guide to creating a social media strategy, based on our academy lesson from Hel Reynolds!
It may feel like strategic social media is a mountain to climb, but don’t feel overwhelmed! Change can be daunting, especially with so much advice to put into practice. Take one area that you want to improve first, implement it, master it, and then you can start on another part. Getting started is better than getting it perfect!
