Running a business now means running social media accounts. These platforms offer a direct line of communication between the business and its customers, which is crucial for success. It has also proven to be important when building brand awareness and gaining real-time engagement and feedback.
However, an efficient strategy is needed to ensure your business reaps the benefits of social media. Without an effective social media strategy, you could be wasting your budget and resources. To ensure your business does not fall into this trap, the three steps below can be followed to boost your social media strategy.
What Are the Three Steps to Improve Social Media Strategy?
1. Perform a Social Media Audit
One of the first steps to carry out when looking to improve your social media strategy is performing a social media audit. This will involve a comprehensive review of your business’ social media platforms.
It will be used to identify strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for improvement. You should check your branding and consistency across all accounts, analyze performance metrics, like engagements and impressions, as well as evaluate your content.
If you want to receive professional advice here, you could hire a professional agency to complete a social media audit. A paid social audit from a company like Dark Horse will include a technical report, an expert panel audit review, and an expert Q&A.
This will ensure your business receives the expertise and knowledge from professionals, who will identify areas for improvement to boost your Facebook and Paid Social Media return on investment (ROI).
The findings will then be narrowed down to those that will be the most effective in enhancing your social media strategy. This will ensure you are not wasting resources and spending on ineffective areas or strategies.
Plus, the identified areas for business growth will ensure you try a range of methods to ensure success instead of playing it safe and losing out in the long run.
2. Align Social Media with Your Business Goals
After performing a social media audit, you can then check that your social media accounts align with the goals of your business. To do this, you must first ensure you have clearly defined business objectives.
These goals should then be translated into measurable and specific aims for social media. You will need to understand your target audience, choose the right platforms, develop a content strategy, and track key performance indicators (KPIs) to achieve success.
To set social media goals, which is a big part of this step, you should use the SMART method. This means goals will be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. An example of this would be setting a goal like “increasing Instagram followers by 10% within the next two months” instead of just stating the goal of “increasing brand awareness.”
With the goals you set, you should determine which specific metrics should be used to track your progress. This might be recording conversions, engagement rates, follower growth, and website traffic.
3. Use Data-Driven Insights for Improvement
Finally, once the social media strategy has been formed, you should use the data you collect to constantly evolve and improve your methods.
There are numerous analytics tools that you can use on various social media platforms; for example, Instagram has an “Insights tool” that provides detailed data on the account’s performance. This particular tool looks at audience demographics, content engagement, and follower growth.
You should analyze this data and KPIs regularly to ensure your strategy is effective. It is important to look for insights, patterns, and trends to inform strengths and weaknesses in your strategy. This will also help you spot where you can improve.
Final Thoughts
To conclude, as social media is a large part of obtaining success nowadays, it is vital to ensure your social media strategy is effective. Your business can improve its strategy through three steps: completing a social media audit, aligning with business goals, and using insights for improvement.
