Picture this: You’ve just left a meeting with the C-suite. Maybe you’re even part of the C-suite. This is your hypothetical situation, so whatever you prefer. Everyone has agreed that your business needs to go all in on a social media and content strategy.
By now, you’ve probably read quite a bit about the benefits of social media to your business. Leveraging social media is a great way to establish or strengthen your brand identity, reach out to audiences you might not have been able to reach before, interact with and provide quality customer service to your existing user base, and it helps with SEO.
Relatively speaking, it’s also a low-cost way to increase leads. The phrase “content is king” has been emblazoned into our brains.
Really, if you’re not engaging on social media, your business is leaving money on the table.
Okay, the decision has been made. It’s time to start pumping out that quality content that’ll get more people interacting with your brand and all that will be left to do is watch those KPIs go up and up.
Great. Now, where do you start?
Where does all this content come from?
How are you going to get it out there in an efficient manner?
These are the questions that start swirling and can feel overwhelming when just starting out executing a social media strategy. Make no mistake, an effective social media campaign requires time and resources.
If you’re responsible for every aspect of marketing, you may find social media to be challenging to dedicate enough time to.
This is why so many businesses choose to partner with an agency to handle their social media needs.
If you’ve been struggling to get results with your social media because of a lack of ideas or irregular posting, it could be because you need to optimize your workflow. With the right pre-planning, your social media presence can go from being scattered and unfocused to a well-oiled machine. Here are some tips for how to get an effective social media content workflow going.
What networks will you target?
While all of these tips are important, this first one needs to be emphasized. Focusing your efforts is the running theme here, and you need to start as narrowly as possible to get the most out of your social media presence. What this means is you don’t need to be everywhere at once.
Maybe Pinterest isn’t the best platform to advertise your IT security business. But, Twitter and Google + certainly are. Buffer, who we’ll actually circle back to a bit later, has created a fairly lengthy guide to give you an idea of what to do during this process. The key takeaway:
“Often times it may be best not to be on certain social networks, perhaps because of the time it takes to do social right or because your customer personas don’t fit with a particular network. When you’re choosing which social networks to be involved with, it’s okay to be picky.”
Trust your instincts. Stick to tried and true marketing methods like identifying who your ideal customers are, and then go to them. Unnecessary social networks just create the need for even more content.
Do you have a voice?
Once you’ve decided on what social media networks to target, the next thing you’ll want to do is settle on the voice you want to have. This may not seem like a difficult step, but it will help with getting content deployed faster.
Do you want to take on a professional tone that comes off as authoritative or a more casual and friendly tone that might encourage different types of interaction? This is a matter of personal preference as well as what you determined in the previous step of establishing customer personas, brand identity, and the social networks you’re targeting.
You may want to engage in some A/B testing here as well. Start with one voice and then compare the results of switching to another. You don’t want to sound like a different person every week, but these early stages are when you should experiment.
Settling on a voice will help you develop the appropriate content at a faster pace.
[clickToTweet tweet=”Settling on a voice will help you develop the appropriate content at a faster pace.” quote=”Settling on a voice will help you develop the appropriate content at a faster pace.”]
Establish source material
The content you produce and share on social media is going to be made up of two things:
- your own original thoughts to demonstrate your expertise
- repurposing of existing content that is tailored to your audience
Take some time to gather a decent cache of websites and other source materials that you think are relevant to your industry and to the interests of your audience.
The point of this tip is to get you in the habit of cutting down your turnaround time for creating posts. If you’ve already curated a list of publications that are relevant to your industry, you can start the week by skimming through them, seeing what might be interesting to your audience, and tweeting a link with some short commentary to add your voice.
This also opens up opportunities for more engagement.
Maybe someone from the publication will respond to you on social media. Maybe the piece will pick up a lot of traffic and you’ll be engaging in a large conversation that ends up attracting visitors to your site.
You never want to give the appearance of operating in a vacuum. Success lies in being able to navigate and stand out in the bigger conversation.
[clickToTweet tweet=”#SocialMedia success lies in being able to navigate and stand out in the bigger conversation.” quote=”Social Media success lies in being able to navigate and stand out in the bigger conversation.”]
Create a posting schedule
The key to being consistent is to develop a schedule reasonably far out in advance that you can stick to. The folks at Hootsuite, who certainly know a thing or two about the business of content, lay out a fairly in depth argument for the benefits of using a social media content calendar to keep your strategy under control.
Nothing can slow down content production like the feeling of being overwhelmed and missing posting dates while you try to figure out what’s going on.
Automate when possible
To circle back to Buffer, services like the ones they provide are useful for this last tip. Manually posting is needless and leaves room for error. In a meeting and can’t make the Google + post your analytics told you would get the most traction at 10 AM? Oh well.
With scheduling software, you can create all your content on Monday, and let it auto post throughout the week while you work on other things. Buffer also gives you insights on all your posts so you can see how effective they are.
These kinds of analytics will help you better craft your content and decide when to actually post it for maximum engagement.
Buffer also gives you insights on all your posts so you can see how effective they are. These kinds of analytics will help you better craft your content and decide when to actually post it for maximum engagement.
Why a partnership can benefit your business
It’s clear that a lot of work goes into a social media strategy. This is why so many businesses fail at it. Seeing a return on your investment requires more than setting up a variety of accounts and posting when you feel like you have something worth advertising.
That’s not how customers typically interact with businesses in these spaces. That’s where Steady Demand can help you.
Not only do we understand how to effectively leverage the most popular social media networks, but we emphasize a results-based strategy. Likes and comments are great, but how about an increase in measurable KPIs that translate into increased revenue?
If you’re considering choosing a partner to assist with your social media efforts, contact us today. We’ll help you come up with a strategy that will benefit your business.
