Creating your business’s social media engagement strategy can become an elongated task before you even know it. While social media may seem like a simple tool on the surface, it really is much deeper than that once you begin to really dive into it.
Social media strategies are not something that can be copied and pasted from one business or one sector to another. What fits for one company may not work for yours because everyone has an innumerable amount of factors coming into play. Hence, your social media strategy, let alone your engagement strategy, will need to be something that’s put forth as unique to you and your business.
Here’s how you can build a strong social media engagement strategy:
Evaluate The Nature Of Your Business
The first step in your process is going to be simple self-realization. Taking stock of your situation, your business, and what your unique outlook is will be the priority in building your strategy from the ground up.
Social media in sports for a professional basketball team, for instance, is going to be different from that of a bakery, and neither is a home improvement store going to have the same engagement strategy as a freelance writer.
Embrace Your Niche
Take a look at your business’s niche and identify what products or services do you deliver. For instance, if you’re a practicing lawyer, and perhaps one of many in a very competitive area, maybe you want to begin including customer testimonials on your social media. When competition is tough, hearing directly from clients of someone you’re considering doing business with can go a long way.
This will be different for every business, and even the lawyer given in the aforementioned example above could elect to go any number of other routes, but there will be a few options that are clear-cut frontrunners in regards to what type of content is best for you.
Capitalize On Your Audience
Different businesses serve different demographics. Your local performance auto shop isn’t likely doing much revenue from the market segment of retired women over the age of 65. The plumbers in your area are probably not getting many calls from kids ages 5-18 since it’s just not their audience.
As a business, you should know your clientele base. Identify that demographic and cater to your social media engagement strategy toward them. Having content that’s relevant to those viewing it will give you a competitive edge over every other business that isn’t.
Focus on creating content that’s not only entertaining to your audience, but relevant, useful, and resonating, too. As a business, the goal is to provide value, even in your social media strategy. The more relevant your content is, the more likely it is that viewers are going to engage with it. If you’ve achieved this, you’re doing it right.
Apply Your Budget To The Strategy
Many social media engagement strategies can be implemented for free. However, there are still cost-effective alternatives that can also be useful for your business’s online presence and growth.
Some of these options would include:
- Paid advertising: Almost all social media platforms offer some form of client campaign advertising tool that allows you to pick a target audience and promote a post to them. It could be your most popular post, a testimonial, a sale, or anything you’d like.
- Hosting events: Hosting events is a great way to draw natural attention to your business. It doesn’t need to be all about your products or services, but can be something simpler and more focused on creating relationships and brand awareness. This can be promoted on social media by posts and prompting others to share and RSVP, ultimately generating some quality user-generating content for your business as well.
- Sales & Giveaways: Whether you’ve thought about it in this manner before or not, it costs money to run a sale. Discounting something is effectively costing you money, especially if you run ads for it. Although this can be worth it because, sometimes, the goal isn’t just to generate revenue, but awareness. Awareness is a crucial aspect of engagement, which can be a very worthwhile investment or up-front loss to take.
Bring All Of This Together To Form Your Social Media Engagement Strategy
Combine all of these observations and knowledge about your business’s specifics and unique situation to bring your plan together. It’s a simple self-audit, which is something that allows you to examine where you stand, where you want to go, and the best way to get there for you.