The Lowdown On Social Media Content Strategy

Welcome to the mother-of-all content marketing strategies for creating contagious content and elevating your presence on social media!

With nearly two-thirds of the American population using social media, it is hard to ignore the power and benefits of mastering your social media channels to your businesses advantage. And with so many options to kick-start your social media, your first instinct will be to create accounts on every platform that you think will be viable for your business. Right? Wrong.

Unfortunately, jumping head-first into creating an account on every platform might not be a good first move for your business if you have no idea what content strategy you are even going to be implementing on your channels. There is a lot to think about when it comes to social media, your business, and your audience. If you really want to make a social impact, you are going to need to develop a content strategy and approach it from all angles. And that’s why we are here – to guide you every step of the way.

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW BEFORE YOU GET STARTED

Spoiler alert: a lot goes into content creation. And when it comes to good content creation, it is about quality over quantity. It is about knowing your users and what drives them to share. It is about understanding what is going to elevate your visibility and reach on your social channels and having that competitive edge over other brands. Sounds easy enough, right? Maybe on paper, but practically, it is not – and that is okay. We are here to help.

You must be thinking, “I get it. Now, how do I do that? How do I get there?” And the answer is research. Creating good content takes time and research. Before you even begin creating content, you will need to think about the following key components:

• Aligning your business goals and social media goals;
• Choosing the right social platform for your product/service;
• Knowing who your target audience is;
• Designing a content process that resonates with your target audience;
• And using benchmarks to measure your results and goals easily.

That is the research aspect of content creation. It all comes down to understanding what your overall goals are for each platform and knowing what exactly makes your audience tick – or not. But let us not get ahead of ourselves. You first need to have a firm understanding of what your social and business goals are and how to maximize your ROI. That is step one.




STEP ONE: ESTABLISHING YOUR SOCIAL AND BUSINESS GOALS

What are you trying to achieve? Are you looking to improve brand awareness? Generate new leads? Drive traffic to your website?

Brand awareness is as the name explains: creating buzz about your brand among your users and ultimately above your competitors. This step boils down granularly to the number of likes, comments, retweets/shares/mentions and other engagement metrics respective to their social media channels.

Lead generation is the initiation of consumer interest to your product or service. It is a way to grab the attention of that person who did not think they would be interested in your product or service, but then hook, line and sinking them into being interested in what you have to say or sell. It is a great strategy for sales leads, list building, e-newsletter list acquisition, building out reward programs, loyalty programs or for other member acquisition programs.

Driving traffic to your website: this one is pretty self-explanatory. It is finding ways by using all your available channels to get people to visit your website and learn more about you or generate a sale.

Once you have established what your social and business goals are, it is on to step two.

STEP TWO: CHOOSING THE RIGHT PLATFORM
With so many options available, it is easy to want to create accounts on all social media channels. But before you pull the trigger on all of them, take the time to study which would be the best to elevate your brand and create a follower profile. A follower profile allows you to identify your perfect customer based on demographics like age, gender, educational and career background.

Here is a breakdown:

Facebook: About 76% of adults online use Facebook. That is a good chunk of the American population. And with features like Facebook Live, Facebook video views have increased to 700-percent and rising. Think about utilizing this platform for more long-form video content.

Twitter: With about 319 million active users and about 80% of its users on mobile, Twitter is most effective for local companies looking to engage with customers on-the-go.

Instagram: Millennials are paving the way on Instagram. With more than 800 million monthly users, Instagram is a great way to engage with young, visual audiences. Think about utilizing Instagram for highly visual designs.

Snapchat: It is tough to reach users on Snapchat, but it is not impossible. Snapchat has about 173 million daily users and serves a mostly young audience – like under 24. Think about utilizing Snapchat at event activations or promotional events. With features like geo-targeting and geo-fencing, local businesses can benefit from the local exposure using a custom-made, branded Snapchat filter.

Pinterest: Like Instagram, Pinterest is powered by mostly visual content. And with around a third of adult internet users accessing Pinterest, it is a viable platform for a wide variety of consumer-related brands. The platform itself appeals more to women so if your brand is female-focused, think about utilizing Pinterest to target that demographic.

LinkedIn: Not many people think to utilize LinkedIn, but as the leading B2B social media platform, and with their members across as many as 200 countries, LinkedIn is the perfect platform for businesses focused primarily on B2B and also personal brands looking for growth.

Once you have figured out which social channels are going to be the best for you, it is time you moved on to step three.

STEP THREE: DESIGNING YOUR CONTENT PROCESS AND KNOWING YOUR AUDIENCE

It’s not just taking a picture. It’s making a picture.

This is 1 of 4 visuals we created for our friends at Hartman Optics for their upcoming trade show booth and marketing collateral. Printed 19 feet tall! 😮

Produced by Brandamos
Wardrobe by Crazy About Costumes

Posted by Brandamos on Wednesday, December 13, 2017

Why do people share content? Believe it or not, there is actually a science behind it. Granted, it is not an exact science, but it is all about understanding the psychology of the mind of the people behind the computer screens. Social media is an effective way to convey emotive content. When it comes to social media, the key motivators for users to share content is the following:

• To define ourselves
• To entertain
• To build relationships
• To get the word out about causes and brands we care about

So when creating content, it is crucial to ask yourself what your goals are with it. Are you entertaining? Educating? Informing? Calling for action? There is no one-size-fits-all way to create content, which is why understanding your audience is so important when it comes to the content creation process. You want to create content that generates an emotional bond with your audience, and all this means is establishing a unique voice and personality for your brand, yet another essential aspect of creating consistent and contagious content.

FINDING YOUR VOICE
Are you fun? Quirky? Serious? Minimalist? Informative? Educational? Professional? The voices are endless, so which one are you? Content has more volume when it has been fine-tuned to a tone that resonates not only with your business but with your audience. You might want to take a professional approach on LinkedIn or a playful tone on Snapchat or Twitter. Keep in mind your voice and align it specifically to what you know about your audience metrics on social channels. We will get to audience metrics. If you have made it this far, you are still clearly interested.

STUDYING YOUR COMPETITION
Content creation also means studying who your competitors are, studying their content strategies and measuring their analytics to see what flipped or flopped on their channels and avoiding their mistakes. It is all about elevating yourself above the competition, which is a great segway to step four.

STEP FOUR: TRACK AND ADJUST

It is the least glamorous part of the content creation process, but one of the most important and that is tracking the success of your strategy and making necessary adjustments. There are many things to look out for, but the common area that businesses are most interested in is engagement, reach and conversions.

Engagements measure the number of people who are taking an action on your post so think retweets, mentions, clicks, likes, comments, shares, etc.

Reach measures the number of people engaging with your unique piece of content.

Conversions measure how many valuable leads are connecting with your brand and how many leads your social posts are generating.

SO, YOU’VE BEEN ELEVATED. NOW, WHAT?

By now, we hope that you understand the complexity behind content creation and the importance of having a content strategy. Remember, a lot of trial and error goes behind posting that pretty picture. It is not a simple one and done.

With some statistics projecting users connecting online to increase from 2 billion to 2.5 billion this year, it is vital to consider how to make the most out of these users on their social platforms. A content strategy is a perfect tool to not only guide you to find your ideal target audience but also helps to engage them on a deep, emotional and visual level that eventually builds trust, which leads to loyalty, which leads to higher conversions and ultimately bigger profits.

A rule of thumb here at Brandamos is to create consistent and contagious content that is thoughtful and relevant to your brand’s values. It is not about posting for the sake of posting or meeting a posting quota. We make sure to elevate your content beyond your competitors and in a way that is highly reflective of your brand’s vision.