In business, social media can be one of your best friends or your most damaging enemy.

It is completely your decision.

It all lies in your social media marketing strategy.

Do you have one?

If you don’t or if your social media marketing strategy is failing, follow along with this post for an in depth look on developing a successful social media marketing strategy.

The Top Benefits Of Social Media Marketing

While large corporations are spending large amounts of money on billboards and television commercials, you can actually reach more consumers with a well designed social media marketing strategy.

The benefits are:

• Increased recognition
• An improvement on loyalty
• Greater conversion opportunities and rates
• Better authority ratings
• Traffic increase
• Lower marketing costs
• SEO benefits
• and Improved customer relations

The Steps In Creating A Social Media Strategy

While it may be tempting to just start throwing blog posts on your social media pages, I suggest you take a step back and consider your strategy first.

Be like the professional chess player that considers what can happen several moves ahead before making their move.

Remember what I said at the start of this post, social media can be an enemy. One misplaced post could damage your business and reputation.

Some examples of disasters:

• Dominos employees did some terrible things with food and posted it to YouTube. They were fired but the video has been viewed over 1,000,000 times. “How about Pizza Hut instead?”
• Or when Home Depot tweeted an image that stirred up racism accusations, the chain lost sales revenues massively over the next few days.

Social Media Marketing Strategy Step #1: Define Your Business Needs and Goals

You want to determine the exact problem you want to solve with your social media marketing strategy.

• More website traffic?
• Better customer loyalty?
• Gaining a better reputation?
• Or maybe you just need brand awareness?

You need to know what your goals are before you make a social media marketing game plan.

Social Media Marketing Strategy Step #2: Set Objectives

You need realistic objectives to reach the goals you have. They need to be:

• Specific
• and have the ability to be measured

Put a time deadline on these objectives and make them reachable.

Social Media Marketing Strategy Step #3: Determine The Target Market

I suggest you sit down in a brainstorming session and create the personas of your ideal customer.

• Where do they live?
• What is their average income?
• What is their age range?
• Is their a gender preference?
• And what social media channel do they use most?

Social Media Marketing Strategy Step #4: Determine What Social Media Channel You Will Start With

It just makes sense that you will use the channel you determined your ideal customer frequents the most. The most common in order are:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• YouTube
• Linkedin
• Google+
• Pinterest

But there are many others. Personally, I recommend Facebook marketing because millions of users have Facebook pages.

Social Media Marketing Strategy Step #5: Create Content That Engages Your Social Media Followers

The content you post regularly on your social media page needs to speak to your followers. You want them engaged. You want to see likes, shares and most importantly, comments.

Make sure your content has at least one Call To Action. It could be:

• Subscribe to our blog and receive a free ebook at (link).
• Follow (business) at (link)
• Did you enjoy this post? See more on this subject at (link)
• Etc…

Social Media Marketing Strategy Step #6: Be Reachable

Here is where many businesses falter…

You need to answer all comments and personal messages from followers who ARE potential customers or recruits.

I suggest you set up alarms that tell you when you have a comment or message. You may want to consider contracting a virtual assistant to handle the social media response for you.

Social Media Marketing Strategy Step #7: Measure Results And Adjust As Needed

If you don’t measure the results of your social media marketing efforts, how will you know if they are working?

Keep track of fans, followers, clicks and other stats.

Make adjustments and see if you get better results.

Conclusion

Keep coming back because I will provide you with more information in the future on social media marketing.

I will probably even take you through methods for each channel.

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Glad you stopped by. Let me know if this helped you with your social media marketing strategy, and please share this with your friends.

Thank you.