The course will cover the current state of social media, researching your audience, avoiding reputational problems, working with influencers and much more.
By way of a brief preview, Judith has provided her insights into planning a social media project, providing a sneak peek of the training. Join us at Social Marketing Strategy to engage with the full range of content and come away with practical and usable advice.
Planning Your Next Social Media Project
Like any other channel, social media has to be planned, but because of the relatively low barrier to entry and the seemingly casual nature of communication over it, sometimes businesses approach it without a clear plan.
Ensuring the messages communicated over each channel – radio, TV, website, social media – is consistent, is important.
Choose the right channel
Much communication can be pre-planned based on the calendar of releases and events but choosing the right channel for the right communication, the right images and the right timings is important.
Some studies suggest that the lifespan of a tweet is around eight minutes, whereas LinkedIn has become a favourite channel of many businesses – showing better engagement and better results. Is LinkedIn right for your business, or is Pinterest better?
Social channels also take time to build. Understanding why your customers choose different channels and how they expect communication to happen through them is an important first step in choosing when and what to communicate over those channels.
For example, if customers use a company Facebook page because of the promise of discounts, the channel will quickly lose traction if more press releases are promoted than discounts. If customers turn to Twitter for customer service, it could be because they are having trouble with traditional channels, or it could be a preferred channel for customer service. Analyse what the expectation of the customer is over that channel before programming a social media strategy.
Careful choices to be made
Once the channel has been matched to need, there is still the possibility to push commercial messages out over it and have a receptive audience, but frequency of these messages has to be carefully programmed.
Pinterest, for example, is unlikely to be the right channel to announce a new CEO appointment, whereas LinkedIn may not be the right place to announce a new pudding recipe.
However, Pinterest can be the right place to promote company culture and feature staff profiles, and LinkedIn can be a place to announce new product launches – including a new pudding recipe (especially if the announcement is by the head chef)! A channel can work in a multitude of ways as long as there is an understanding of the customer type and expectation on that channel.
Once categorised, each channel needs an audience. Broadcasting to an existing email marketing list can work well to start, but part of the attractiveness of social media is attracting an engaged audience you don’t already know.
Lookalike audiences used in social media advertising can work exceptionally well in attracting the right audience.
Understanding what customers expect from each channel, why they are engaging over it and attracting new people to the channel is just one part of a good social media strategy. Sign up to the Social Media Strategy course to get the complete picture.
