Your business needs a social media marketing plan. Social media is simply too big to ignore. Billions of people log into social media platforms every month, and these people are often an integral part of your business’s demographic.
But you don’t have the money to pay a professional to provide your business with social media marketing strategies and a plan.
What can you do?
Choose the Networks to Target
What social media network is your demographic using? Which networks are the biggest? You need to figure out where your demographic likes to spend their time. A few statistics to help you are:
- 75% of males and 83% of females online are on Facebook
- 32% of teens are on Instagram
- Females use Instagram more than males
- 29% of Twitter users have a college degree
- 81% of Millennials log into Twitter daily
- Instagram users fall between the age of 18 and 29
- Over 22% of the world is on Facebook
Target the right platform for your audience
So, if you’re targeting teens, you may want to focus on Instagram, while a
generally good choice is Facebook. Twitter has struggled to stay afloat, yet
the social media network attracts millennials and has a high portion of users
that have a college degree.
LinkedIn, on the other end of the spectrum, is filled with professionals and companies, making it a great choice when trying to network and make connections.
While this is a brief look at social media sites, you can use this information to narrow down your social media target.
These will be your key social channels.
Create a Plan for Your Posts
Social media relies on you posting content and mingling with your target audience. You have a lot of options, and these include:
- Checklists
- Videos
- Images
- Infographics
- Education posts
- eBooks
- Blog posts (linked to in posts)
It’s always a good idea to mix in educational posts to build trust with your audience. If you simply post promotional content, you’ll quickly find that your audience is getting bored of you. You need to be personal and informative to really attract a following that’s responsive.
If your goal is to increase leads, you’ll need to get your audience to your website or landing pages via blog posts, videos or images. This can be done with short posts that lead the viewer to more information.
Consistent Posting
Schedule Your Social Media Posts
There’s a recipe to follow when posting to your audience. This recipe takes into account:
- Times when engagement are high
- Content that works the best
But everyone’s audience is slightly different. The best you can do in the beginning is to start with consistent posting. CoSchedule looked at 14 studies and found:
- 1 Facebook post per day between 1pm and 4pm works best
- 15 tweets per day between 2am and 10pm work best
- 11 pins per day between 2am and 11pm works best
- 1 LinkedIn post per day between 10am and 11am is ideal
- 1 –2 posts on Instagram is ideal, with one between 8am and 9am and other at 2am
There’s a lot of work to do, so start by creating an excel file and tracking your posts. I recommend starting with one social media network and expanding as you master each network.
Adjust and Measure
You should adjust and measure your results. There’s no sense in doing what doesn’t work. I recommend using tools to help you monitor your results, but you can also do this in an excel file, although it’s a lot of work.
Keyhole has a great list of tools for measuring results.
There’s also the option of using a scheduling tool, which I highly recommend for businesses that need to post often. A few tool options, include:
There are other options, but these are the most affordable options in most cases. You’ll find some free tools, but a lot of these tools only work for a short period of time before they either go without updates or are changed to a paid service.
Once you start measuring your results, you’ll be able to find out what works for you.
Just keep in mind that every plan needs to be long-term.
A successful social media campaign will connect you with your customer for the long term
If you only use social media for a week or two, you’re setting yourself up for failure. The goal is to build an audience, and once you really start building your audience, you’ll be able to expand your reach much further through shares, likes and retweets.
Once your plan is in place, keep up with your posting, measure, tweak and reap the benefits.
