What is a strategy? It is a high-level plan for bringing about desired results, like achieving a goal or finding a solution to a problem. Most people often get confused between strategy and tactics which is specific action to achieve a specific result.
Therefore, a successful social media strategy shouldn't be just focused on tactics as it is nothing without a strategy. Well, there can be many flaws in a social media strategy. Here are four common flaws in an ineffective social media strategy, and tips on how to fix them.
You don't know your audience
It's virtually impossible to write a successful social post without knowing who your audience is and what they're passionate about. A successful social media strategy starts with defining audience personas.
It is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer or core audience, based on market research and data you collect about your existing customers.
When building an audience persona, gather key information about your current customers or visitors, including demographics, careers, behavior patterns, interests, etc. Keep in mind that a brand can have several audience personas.
For instance, let's say a brand sells marketing software. They can have one audience of a digital marketer who would use the product and another audience of the C-suite executive who would be responsible for purchasing the software.
Aside from identifying, understanding who your customers are can help determine which marketing platforms your brand should focus on, and which ones you should ignore.
For instance, if you are selling apparel for teenagers then your audience will be kids between the ages of 12-17 years. Understanding the behaviors and interests of your target leads to focusing on social platforms like Instagram and TikTok.
However, don't rely too much on what is working today. Always keep an eye on new social media platforms as they have an amazing growth opportunity.
You're not speaking with your audience
Using social platforms to promote a sale or encourage people to read our blog shouldn't be the center point of a social strategy. Community management and social listening are crucial parts of any successful social media strategy.
Community management focuses on user retention and building brand loyalty with your existing customers.
Social listening involves keeping tracking mentions or discussions about your organization or brand on various platforms.
Therefore, a brand should always respond to both positive and negative comments and reviews to build a community of engaged followers who will become loyal brand advocates.
Use tools like Buffer, Hootsuite, GoogleAlerts, and other social media monitoring tools to set up alerts for mentions of your brand name, product names, branded hashtags, and names of executives.
Your strategy and tactics don't support your business objectives
Another mistake that people make while making a social media strategy is their strategy doesn't support their business objective.
For instance, a business objective for a brand that sells apparel is to sell its new customized t-shirt. As a result, their social media strategy is to create content for both paid and organic to direct customers to their website to purchase customized t-shirts.
With a social media strategy in place to support its business objectives, it can now implement several specific tactics, such as increasing web traffic to blog posts that demonstrate different customized t-shirts for winter.
Finally, now that the tactics have been defined, the company can create social posts that will help them achieve their business objectives.
So before creating any social media content make sure your tactic is within your social media strategy which supports your business.
Nottracking key performance indicators (KPIs) weekly, monthly, or quarterly
The only way to measure the success of your social media strategy is to regularly measure your KPIs to determine which tactics are working, and which ones aren't.
Track performance on a weekly, monthly, or quarterly basis. Weekly reports can help identify the content types your customers engage with most, and content or topics they are more likely to respond to. These are some of the key metrics you should track every week:
Growth of the followers – How many followers have you gained in the last week
Engagement – The number of users interacting with your content
Reach – Number of users who saw your content
Clicks – How many users click on your post
Conversions – How many users complete a specified action–like signing up for a newsletter, reading your blog post, making a purchase, etc?
Tracking your monthly report as will help you to identify the signs of growth like new followers, engagement, and conversion.
Monthly performance reports can also help identify trends that can help you to shape your overall social strategy, like identifying the best times and days to post for maximum engagement.