Before you can create an award-winning social media marketing blueprint, you’ll have to carefully analyze your current efforts.
Maybe you have a social media strategy already in place, but it’s not bringing you the limitless success you were hoping for. On the other hand, maybe you don’t have a strategy at all and you’ve just been shooting in the dark whenever you’ve had the chance.
This is all a pretty standard kind of approach to social media marketing. Analyzing your current agenda and effort will help you find the places where you need to fill holes later, so you’ll want to make notes as you go along.
Which platform have you had the most success on so far? (And this doesn’t necessarily mean it was the best platform, but you’ll get to that later.) Which posts drive the most engagement? (i.e, likes, loves, comments, shares.)
Is there a type of content that tends to perform better than others? Have you experimented with social paid advertising? Was it successful?
These are all questions that you *might* have answers for, but if you don’t, it’s not a big deal. The only difference between having some sort of information to go off of and starting fresh is that there’s slightly less experimenting to do.
When all the analyzing is behind you, you’re ready to really dive in and get your hands dirty. And the first step is setting short term and long term goals.
Where do you want your social media marketing blueprint to carry your business in the next year? How many followers would you like to have added to your profiles by then? Are you anticipating wild growth? A slow steady growth?
Whatever your goals might be, remember to keep them attainable and relatable. Goals that are impossible to reach are hard to break into smaller goals and it’s far too easy to get discouraged when you’re always reaching for the stars but never touching them.
You’ll want to ask yourself things like:
- What social platforms are we focused on?
- Why those platforms?
- Is our content relevant to our target audience?
- Have we experienced success on social media?
- What types of problems have we had to face on social media?
- Does our audience seem responsive to our messages?
- Are we taking advantage of social media as the powerful platform that it is?
Of course, there will be questions that you need to create that are tailored to your particular industry in order to really define your business goals on social media, but above all, your main goal is going to be fast results, business development, and growth and preserving, maintaining and protecting your online reputation.
Asking the kind of questions that we have outlined above, plus whatever you come up with as far as your industry is helpful because it reveals the current “state of affairs” when it comes to your online interaction and presence on social media.
And in addition, it will help you develop your social media blueprint for business in that you’ll have a better understanding of the exact steps you’ll need to take to create your ideal strategy and what your social community management will end up looking like at the implementation stage of the process.
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Just make sure that through the creation process, you’re keeping the three main goals in mind. These include: defining your brand, defining your audience, and defining what success looks like for YOUR business on social media. Because success for you will often look different than success for others.
A good example of this: in some industries, leads are much harder to get into the funnel, but there is much less friction and much more of a chance that the few who do find their way into it will come out a customer.
In this case, you may have to put an emphasis on getting leads into the funnel and followers as opposed to the amount of engagement your posts may get on social.
