Social media is a huge part of our lives. Needless to say, social media marketing is one of the best ways to connect with your audience, build brand awareness, drive website traffic, and nurture the relationship with your existing customers.
Building a strong social media presence is possible only with the right social media marketing strategy and planning. Here are some key points to consider when building an efficient social media strategy:
Before getting into social media planning; if you need further information about social media marketing, here are our A-Z guides for you to have a more comprehensive knowledge:
Now let us walk you through the entire process of creating a social media plan through our online learning platform: the Growth Marketing Hub. And don’t worry if you don’t have an established brand. The Growth Marketing Hub is designed to give you the opportunity to exercise each module and process so that you can just practice and learn.
You might need the data from your Growth Marketing Strategy input (full brand check-up, personas, positioning, etc., in order to create your plan. Before you start, please make sure you have completed the previous stages on the Growth Marketing Hub.
For those who don’t have an established brand, or if you haven’t completed the previous steps, you can use the Growth Marketing Hub to simply exercise each module and process.
We start with the “Social Media Planning” menu at the Growth Marketing Hub panel and select the “Create a New Social Media Tactic” box.
With this module, you will exercise and learn the important points to consider when creating a social media plan according to your business.
At this step, you can either choose one of the brands/products you have created at the “Internal Checkup” phase- from the dropdown menu, or you can easily create a new brand.
Select an existing brand:
Or create a new brand:
Click “NEXT STEP” to proceed.
Again, you can choose one of the personas you have created in the “Persona Creation” phase from the dropdown menu, create a new persona, or simply choose all personas.
Choose an existing (specific) persona:
Create a new persona:
Choose all personas:
Click “NEXT STEP” to proceed.
As you may remember, we have discussed the content types briefly in our Content Marketing Planning Guide. In the first step, you will choose which content you will promote on your social media posts.
An important point is, every platform has its own characteristics like the tone, audience, or purpose of use. Therefore, you need to take into consideration the content type when creating your tactic. For example, use cases and infographics fit better with LinkedIn and Facebook; but images, videos, and gifs work better on Instagram.
Here’s a brief guide for you to see which social media platform best fits your brand:
Facebook is mostly used for brand awareness and brand marketing efforts for B2C. The platform’s audience consists of mainly generation X and millennials.
YouTube is mainly used by millennials and generation Z. Brands use this platform for brand awareness and engagement.
Instagram is best for brand engagement and influencer marketing in B2C businesses and its core audience is millennials and generation Z.
LinkedIn is used for networking and HR purposes where B2B brands can perform lead generation, customer acquisition content marketing, and recruiting activities. The platform’s audience is mainly baby boomers, generation X, and millennials.
Twitter is used for brand engagement and public relations by both B2B and B2C businesses and its audience is mostly millennials.
Pinterest: Used by millennials and younger baby boomers for inspiration and discovery; Pinterest is best for brand awareness and product promotion in B2C businesses.
Let’s say that we are going to attend the Financial Industry event. Here’s an example of a social marketing tactic, where we want our audience to fill out the form on our contact page (our target page).
Each social media platform has its own visual codes and image sizes. You need to take the image features into consideration.
Ready? Click SUBMIT!
You can see all of your created Social Media Tactics on this screen. The first tactic you see on the display will be the last one you created.
You can also create a new tactic, search for a tactic, copy, print, and download your plan as an Excel sheet or PDFs, or remove the tactics you have completed or want to delete from the list.
When you click “details”, you will access the tactic details, where you can copy or delete the tactic separately.
