A Social Media Strategy MUST Include These 3 Stages
When developing a social media plan it’s important to recognize there are stages of development that your social profiles and audience will go through. The process of building a social media program changes over time, and failure to recognize this will most certainly result in failing to meet your goals on social media.
A brief overview:
Find Your Voice
Finding your voice is critical on social media. You will never be able to rise above the noise of the crowd until you are able to develop your own unique voice and message that sets you apart from everyone else. What is the unique mission or set of values that your company lives by? What is unique about your company culture or style? How do you differentiate from competitors? What is the relationship like between your company and its customers? Answering these questions can be a good start to finding a unique voice for you or your company on social media.
Build an Audience
You can’t build a loyal audience without a unique message. Once you’ve found that message which resonates with your customers on social media, you will notice followers and/or likes to your page will begin to rise. Start to become more analytical in your approach at this stage. Begin measuring likes, comments and sharing of your content. Discover what motivates your audience to share and engage with your content. Review your audience and make sure they resemble your target market segments. Begin to build processes which ensure you are sharing high performing content more often, and that content producers are informed about what is working best.
Monetize Your Audience
You will know you’ve built a successful audience when your campaigns result in more revenue than your on-going activities are costing you. How big this audience will be is anybody’s guess, but it’s likely to be a bigger number than you first anticipated. By monitoring conversion rates on campaigns and your audience growth rate, you may be able to predict future revenue with some degree of accuracy, but it takes a while to get to that point. In my experience it is not unusual for it to take 1 to 3 years before an audience reaches a stable mass, but once they do, social media platforms can yield extraordinary returns. This is why a strong commitment at the outset is needed to ensure you get there.
To recap:
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