The latest statistics from Pew Internet show that 73% of online adults use social media regularly.
How do you get them to pay attention to what your company offers?
It’s all about the strategy, which is why we’ve collected some articles and templates to help you get started with this important area.
1. Eight Step Social Plan
Convince and Convert provides an eight-step overview of its own social media strategy. It covers creating a social media team, listening to your customers, setting goals and metrics for success, audience analysis, identifying your USP, working out how to act like a person and creating a plan for the different channels where you will be active.
2. Create Your Own Template
Co-Schedule, the
editorial calendar software company, has provided a guide to creating your own social media calendar template. The guide covers the different types of social messaging, including content themes and content curation; the mix of social messaging; frequency and dates. It also looks at a team approach to social media content creation.
3. Goals and Strategy Template
Digital marketing agency
Fusion Farm has a free template to download to assist you with establishing goals, dates, campaigns, strategy and content sources. There’s also useful advice on measuring the success of your strategy and adapting it where necessary. You need to opt in to download the template.
4. Seven Point Social Media Plan
Return on Now provides interesting statistics on social media as a lead in to a seven-point social media plan. This includes conducting an audit of existing activities, learning from successes and failures, fitting social media marketing into the rest of your marketing mix, setting objectives and identifying audiences. The plan also includes mapping out the strategy, choosing platforms and planning your communication.
5. 10 Steps to Align Social with Your Business
Niall Devitt outlines 10 steps for developing a social media strategic plan. The steps include working out how social media aligns with your existing business, finding opportunities for using social media, identifying goals, KPIs and values, choosing channels and tactics, using analytics, executing the strategy and measuring and adapting.
6. Questioning Social Media Marketing
Entrepreneur takes an interesting approach by asking ten questions about creating a social media marketing plan. This covers some areas that are not fully explored in some of the resources listed above.
For example, it covers identifying who should execute the social media strategy, whether the company needs to be on all the main social media networks and which networks are best for particular business areas.
It also asks about different content types for different networks and highlights some social media mistakes to avoid.
7. Downloadable Content Calendar
We’re back where we started with another resource from
Convince and Convert. This is a downloadable content calendar template which integrates social media content planning into the wider content marketing arena.
It allows you to identify important events linked to your content publishing strategy and includes columns for linking these to social media.
The resources listed here will help you decide on what’s most important to your business on the social media sites. Use them as a starting point for creating a social media strategy that works for your business.
