Why Do You Need A Social Media Strategy? Read more.

Attempting to build a brand on social media without a well-defined strategy can be completely counterproductive. You’ll find yourself merely posting for the sake of it, with little rhyme or reason. As a result of this haphazard approach, you’ll see no return.

A social media strategy clearly defines how your organisation will utilise social media in order to achieve its communications aims. This strategy lists the supporting platform and tools you will use to achieve your goals.

At a basic level social media strategy is a simple statement of intent, outlining the goals and measurable objectives for utilising social media, and the target outcomes that you want to attain. It does this in against the background of the overarching business and communications plan so that social media isn’t working in a silo but working in parallel with other channels. The social media strategy isn’t a detailed plan of action – you’ll also need a plan – however without a clear strategy, how do you prioritise the activities for a plan? Think strategy first, plan second.

Even if you’re not involved in social media actively, other businesses are, including your competitors.  Most likely a substantial proportion of your customers. Not understanding that this is where many people hold conversations means you’re not part of the discussion, and you can’t influence what takes place. If you don’t know exactly what’s being said, how can you manage your brand reputation online effectively? And how are you able to ensure that your key messages are being heard by the people who you most want to talk to?

To Build a Strong And Organic Presence

The first reason why you need a social media strategy is because it will assist you to build a strong, organic presence online. You’ll have the ability to plan out posts in advance, and get these posts scheduled and set. All of this, in-turn, will assist you to stick to social media rule number one: posting regularly. Not maintaining consistency is one massive reason social media accounts stop growing.

To Save Time

The second benefit to establishing and implementing a social media strategy is that it will assist you save time. Yes, getting everything together in order to create a content calendar and content bank is a huge task at first, however getting your posting needs sorted and scheduled for the next week or month will greatly lower the time you spend on actually posting each day. No more staring at a blank PC screen and then having to scrambling to figure out what to post – you’ll now have the ability to spend a little more time on other tasks, and on analysing what’s working.

Make Sure That Your Goals are Covered

Having a social media strategy firmly in place will make sure that your social media efforts are more fruitful. In addition, having such a strategy will help you to work towards supporting your broader business goals. Putting a social media strategy together encompasses outlining your business goals so that you are able to work backwards to create posts which reinforce them. In addition, you’ll also want to outline some social media goals (as well as track them) so you have a rock-solid goal to work towards, and to confirm that the work which you are doing is paying off.

Get in touch with the Digital School of Marketing

If you want to study social media marketing then you need to check out our Social Media Marketing Course. Follow this link for more information.