Byline Social Media Strategy Template Made Easy

E signature social media strategy template

in this video I will share with you a complete social media strategy template that I have used to create social media strategy for several Fortune 500 brands and you can use to map out how you will achieve your goals or your clients goals using social media if you are new to this channel then you should consider subscribing as I post weekly videos with hacks tutorials and even break down the steps that you need to take to apply the strategies that we cover now if you stick around to the end of this video then you will have a good understanding on how to build a social media strategy with all of the key elements required and in the proper order I also created a template that you can download from the link in the description below so that you can use it as a companion to this video let's jump right into it if you're running a business or working for a business then you have business goals now those goals could be to increase sales 10% this year or to drive a lift in client retention by 30% for example now regardless the reason you need to create a social media strategy is because you are looking to obtain a business goal so it is crucial for you first and foremost to align these business goals with social media and establish key performance indicators that you can look at each month and will tell you how you are progressing towards your goals now depending on the nature of your business these goals might be different for example if you are looking to increase awareness of your business the goal might be to get more impressions more views or potentially get more followers on social media and you might measure that with the KPI of impressions potentially reach potentially followers versus if you were using social media to drive sales for your business you might be looking at total revenue may be return on your advertising spend or other KPIs tied to an action again why is this important because you're using social media to get an end business result you're not using social media to get likes to get followers I mean you might be doing that but that's not really gonna help you grow your business you want to have a business goal and objective that is measurable that you can say hey I'm gonna turn on or I'm gonna invest into social media and I'm gonna return back for my money so first and foremost it is absolutely important if you're gonna have a social media strategy for your business to understand what is your goal what is your objective why are you coming on to these platforms what are you looking to get out of it and then from there everything else will unfold the next thing is to define your target audience you might have multiple audiences that you're looking to target or there might be an influencer in the decision and also a purchaser if you're dealing with a business to business model common target audience parameters that we like to focus on is age gender demographic what area of the United States or the world the person lives in psychographics do they live at home with parents is this person do they have certain online shopping behaviors the list goes on and on you really want to come onto the platform with this knowledge beforehand because if you think about it platforms just for example as Facebook have over 2 billion active users and if you didn't have a very well-defined target audience profile when you got on the platform your content might not resonate with the audience because maybe it was content better fitted for a younger audience or older anyways case in point you really want to understand who your audience is before you get onto social media because that's gonna determine a lot of things like the network's the platforms that you're gonna be on and also some of the content that you're gonna create it takes us into our third step which is platform strategy first and foremost you want to understand the purpose of the platform each social media network has a different purpose an example I like to give people and clients sometimes is that think about for example LinkedIn as the business platform right think about how you would interact in that scenario where you were with colleagues or industry people how would you talk how would your your tone how are your body language look in that scenario what are the kinds of things you would say with those dynamics versus if you were on a more informal platform such as snapchat Instagram Twitter the tone changes the content changes the things you say and the things you show change so in that very same different social media networks have different dynamics they have different behaviors the way you would behave at your place of work is not the same way you would behave and interact if you were at a bar per se so it's very important for you to understand these nuances the differences of the platform the culture that each platform has and you want to define what is the purpose of the platform is this the channel where for example you give news updates release new products in the pipeline or is this the channel where you interact one-on-one with your audiences where you start communications and where you foster a community it's very important that you define a purpose for each platform and a strategy so you understand what are the things you're gonna say and do there and also know that not not although you might have you know one target audience you might not be collectively able to target them just on one single platform also if you have multiple audiences in your world in your environment you might want to consider using different platforms to target different audiences for example platforms such as Instagram or snapchat that might skew a little bit younger even musically potentially which skews even younger than snapchat you might want to talk to a certain part of your audience and then potentially you might want to use Facebook or Twitter or Pinterest to talk to you know another demographic of your target audience shifting to number four messaging your messaging strategy this is super important I'm gonna break it down into two different areas for you guys you have your organic social media tone which should just be an extension of the brand tone meaning you know how do how does the brand communicate how does it convey itself does it is it informal is it formal is it fun is it savvy is it sophisticated what's the voice molding that and shaping that into your social media voice and also creating messaging pillars for your ads so that when you create ads on Facebook for example the people that are interacting with your ads what are you gonna be saying to those people are your message is gonna be more brand building focusing on introducing the brand to potential new prospects or is it going to be very action driven direct response telling your audience to take actions such as visit your website or purchase your product or inquire about your you know your software or your solutions it's very important to distinguish that although you do have an organic audience that might follow you natively on your social channels you can definitely use ads to amplify and reach people beyond that and the things that you're gonna say to those people might be completely different because one audience might already be very familiar with your brand while another audience might just this might be the first time that they're being introduced to it so you definitely want to segment your messaging strategy into an organic one and an amplified one as well shifting into content strategy content so what can I tell you about content once you understand you know what your goals are who your audience is what platforms are gonna be on now you can really start to get into content why well some platforms over indexed with certain types of content for example on LinkedIn articles reports and white papers do extremely well so well that LinkedIn the platform has actually created ad units or you can actually promote one of your white papers or downloadables for example whereas other platforms that might not be that popular I can't tell you the last time I saw a downloadable on or someone trying to promote like their ebook on Facebook for example so certain platforms over indexed with certain types of content and it's because they have a different audience so on Facebook we have a mass audience we have a little bit of everything that is a platform that's great to show any news about your company great to show company culture the behind the scenes and you can use content such as just images and videos they do extremely well you could also link out obviously to your website if you have a blog on your website articles that you post is obviously certainly link back to that Facebook also has more interactive units such as 360 images 360 video obviously the platform's always looking to to better engage people yeah now there's content also that might do well on Facebook that might do on other platforms for example Instagram IG story specifically is great to unveil new products show behind-the-scenes and also connect use Instagram probably most in other platforms to showcase influence or partnerships actually 59% of influencers say that Instagram is either a little too platform for brand partnerships but again the point is not every piece of content belongs on every platform Twitter does amazing when it comes to memes and gifs or gifts take your pick but that might not translate well into Pinterest or LinkedIn which is more of a business professional network so you definitely want to take into account as you're planning you know these different platforms what is the kind of content that you're going to show on every platform one thing most people do when they start up is they have a limited amount of production of content so they basically take whatever they post it on Instagram they're gonna post it on Twitter and on Facebook and on linked it this is not a best practice by any means but it's totally understandable if you're getting started up and you have limited resources to repurpose from one brand from one platform to another I highly recommend against this whenever possible to give you an example think about this think about when you used to used to watch TV because I'm assuming now you just watch Netflix in YouTube think about three different channels you like to watch so I'll give you some of the channels I used to watch a lot let's say ABC ESPN and MTV now imagine that every time you went to one of these channel they had the exact same show on same programming right what would make you want to tune into ABC if you could also watch the game on ESPN and it was the same content was the same people they were saying the same things I mean there was no difference and then what would make you actually go on to MTV nothing right the same way is the same approach that you want to take to your content on these different platforms there are different channels so you want to use these platforms effectively and as you're developing your social media strategy you really want to understand what you're gonna say differently on each platform and how you're going to execute your content so that it can be as native as possible to that channel experience moving on point number six amplification which is a advertising as you know most of your content one is going online organically it's not being seen by a lot of people unless you already have millions and millions of followers a hundred thousands of followers and even in that case only a fraction of those people are actually seeing your ads maybe on average as low as you know two to three percent depending on what platform you're on why is this it is the nature of these algorithms part of it is to make a better user experience because just imagine if every single person that you followed on Facebook or Instagram every single person you followed you saw every single update they gave you it would be terrible you would have a terrible platform experience so the algorithms are smart and what they do is that they know your level of affinity with the person based on how often you engage with them and they also determine you know the other content that you like and they kind of try to wade in to give you a little bit of everything but prioritizing the content and the people that you tend to interact with the most now the second part of it is capitalism 101 these platforms have to make money so if you were able to reach all of your audience organically you wouldn't have to pay now amplification is a very very important part of your social media strategy especially if you are a new business starting up because again there might not be a lot of people that are currently following you or necessarily know about your business so using ads to get in front of those people that are currently not following you is a phenomenal strategy that can be done very cost-effectively on these platforms so when you're outlining your social media strategy some things to consider is obviously you want to have a budget per platform know what platforms to prioritize your money usually in my experience I've probably put about 70 percent of my dollars into Facebook and have split the rest between other platforms like Instagram Twitter and LinkedIn now of course it's going to depend on who your audience is if your audience you know if you have an audience that doesn't really fit with LinkedIn or Twitter it might not make sense to advertise a good way to strategize though is figure out what percentage of your audience is on each platform so for example if you're targeting 25 to 34 year-olds they over index very well Facebook that's where you're gonna have your biggest audience size on Instagram as well on snapchat not as much somewhat on Twitter but definitely a lot less than Instagram and then Facebook and then you want to divvy up your budget and percentages based on what are the platforms that you can reach them most cost-effectively also other things you want to consider here is how often are you gonna run ads are you gonna do it once a week are you gonna do it only for promotions or when you have some new great exciting piece of business of updates coming out of your business you also want to determine how long you're gonna run these campaigns if you're doing a what I consider an always-on strategy which is basically taking on a weekly basis one post that performed the best in terms of engagement and putting money behind it I would recommend you know two to four hundred dollars depending on the kind of budget you're working with and letting in run over 24 hours now if you don't have a large audience already you can use those ads to acquire new people and engage new people if you have an existing audience and you're just trying to you know keep them in the loop on a weekly basis then you might want to focus a majority of those dollars towards them and again you also want to understand the purpose of your ads depending on the the model the business model that you have you might want to focus all of those ad dollars on driving people to your website to convert into an action whether that's buying something online submitting a lead visiting the store locator section of your website or the contact page of your website or whether that's you know you're trying to engage the audience and get them to comment and start a social conversation around your brand's regardless of what it is you want to really outline this within your amplification strategy and I have a bunch of other videos on you know how to set up Facebook Ads and how to outline your strategy so make sure to subscribe to my channel where you can see more of that content anyways moving on governance what does this mean well you are going to create this social media strategy you're going to deploy it and you're going to be interacting with people on the Internet one thing you really want to understand is determining a governance strategy which is when do you respond to people on social media do you respond to every comment that you get might not be the best idea if you have complaints for example you need to understand and what situations you response to the complain and in what situations you don't or what situations you have to block or banned users to prevent further harm from your brand so as a rule of thumb if somebody is complaining about a product or service or something about your brand and you feel they're complaining about it in a way you can address it you always want to shoot them a comment and let them know that you would love to learn more about the the incident or the situation so you can help them out and ask them to send you a private message or a DM that way you can get them to stop talking about your brand name hurting it in a visible place like your newsfeed or on a picture on a video or something so you can get them to to message you privately and then you could address their issues if a person continues to badger your brand usually I like to use the three strikes rules usually I like to use a three strikes rule where if they continue to talk about the brand's bad three times and you try to help them and they're not looking for help just ban them or block them now the next thing I want to get into is monitoring results so the reason you started all of this you created a strategy is because you had business goals and you had key performance indicators to tell you how well you're doing towards those business goals and regardless of what those business goals is you want to monitor performance a few ways to do that is you do a biweekly or a monthly report or you're looking at your KPIs and they're looking at how much money you spent in advertising you're looking at how many impressions that you get how many website visitors how many engagements how many people purchase online and then you're looking at your KPIs and efficiency what was your return on advertising spend what was your cost per engagement or your cost per click cost per lead whatever your business goal was and your KPI is were you want to monitor them and even your organic performance as well as see how your organic content is doing how many people are your posts are reaching all those things are super important because at the end of the day you're doing this to make more money because you are in business hopefully so again social strategy helps you get to where you want to be but if you don't know what your business goals are if you don't know who your audience is everything else just starts to get very loose and very weak so I really encourage you guys to really focus on these first two elements here up front because they're gonna dig platforms are gonna be on what you're gonna say to people what kind of content you're gonna use and how you're gonna invest your money so with that said thank you guys so much make sure to download the strategy template that I created as a companion and if you guys really enjoyed it let me know drop me a comment and I'll make sure to continue doing this for future videos hey guys thank you so much for watching if you liked the video make sure to give it a thumbs up and subscribe if you learned something new and as always make sure to tune in every week to marketing hustle where we simplify marketing so that you can grow your digital influence and your business until the next video peace [Music]