Facebook management - How to build a successful social media plan | Weboptim
What works for one business will not necessarily work for another, even if they are in the same industry. Before setting one or more goals, find out how your business is doing. First, check your brand's digital presence, including social media audit. We will then analyse our marketing and sales channels to determine what significant impact the improvements could have. These steps are among the unmissable tasks of Facebook management.
To attract attention, generate leads, nurture the community or study our audience? Through monitoring and analysis, we can find out which objective would have the greatest impact on our business. If we answer this question, we have our goal.
Goal setting is important because in order to be able to generate results from social media marketing, you need to be able to set meaningful goals. We cannot identify success or failure if we are not aware of the extent to which we are close or far from achieving our goals.
The target we set will determine the strategies we adopt and the performance indicators we should follow.
Tip:
- align the objectives with the core values of our brand
- what makes each social media platform different, let's use it to our advantage
- our campaigns should be unique to differentiate the brand
- when setting goals, make sure that our efforts are consistent from time to time
1. Increase brand awareness
Facebook has 1.94 billion monthly active users. Whether you're in skincare or IT software, your business can most likely leverage social media channels to get your brand in front of your audience.
We aim to strengthen brand awareness when we launch a new product or service, when we have lost significant market share or when we want to reach a new target market.
View the brand awareness indicators
Measuring brand awareness can be a bit problematic, as a focus group is needed to measure brand awareness. However, some specific numbers give a very good idea of how strong the brand presence is:
- average achievement per post
- website traffic from social media
- number of followers
- number of mentions of our brand
- registration activity
How to increase brand awareness?
Once we have identified the relevant indicators, it is time to look at them. First, start publishing content that your audience might be interested in. Your brand is competing with many other brands for users' favour, so your content needs to be unique and valuable.
The content may be educational, informative, entertaining or inspirational. Try to mix content with a balance of the four types and minimise the amount of promotional posts. For example, the "Force of Nature" campaign by outdoor gear brand REI highlights women in the outdoors. "Don't just sit and wait for opportunities to come...get up and create opportunities yourself!" . The content relates to REI's mission and is designed to inspire, not directly sell.
We can develop content that increases brand awareness in a number of ways. When we add a little personality to the content, we remind everyone that we are human. We can also try influencer marketing, but be sure we approach it in the right way. Run a competition or give a gift with a purchase if your audience likes free stuff (and who doesn't).
To increase the reach of a post, publish a popular post, capitalise on its virality and add a relevant hashtag. If you have a decent marketing budget, you can invest in the benefits of social media advertising. You can reach thousands of people with post highlighting on a low budget!
2. Website traffic/lead
Website traffic and leads (enquiries) are indicators of traffic and revenue. Social media platforms are speeding up the process of increasing traffic and revenue through a maze of hyperlinks and clickable media.
You can set a target for traffic and leads if sales are stagnating, if your website is not getting enough attention, or if you want to promote your inbound marketing channels. If we want to increase our website traffic and leads, analytics will tell us exactly how much our efforts are paying off. In this Facebook ad, JAM invites potential subscribers to learn more about its kids online courses and sign up for a free trial.
How can we drive traffic to our website?
According to Social Media Examiner's 2017 Social Media Marketing Industry report, 78% of survey respondents said social media marketing has helped them increase traffic. This result indicates that businesses are well placed to take advantage of social referrals. To drive traffic, create the best possible content for your target audience. The more accurate and relevant your content, the better your conversion rates from social links will be.
You can combine several strategies to increase website traffic and leads. Make sure your profile is in line with your brand aesthetic so that your users' expectations are met. Link to our website whenever possible. Link to our website in our page description, branded posts and anywhere else we can link to our website in a relevant way.
When creating posts, we can promote our latest blog post and our content offers (e-book, templates, etc.) to drive traffic to our brand's source.
Advertising and influencers can also help promote our content. When investing in social media advertising, make sure you're targeting properly to avoid wasting money on irrelevant traffic. An influencer can share your website link with their audience and help create content that both their followers and your own followers will enjoy.
3. Building community
Our social media pages, combined with our followers and influencers, form an online community. Our mission is to nurture and grow this community through valuable tools that represent the values, image and vision of our organisation.
Building our social media community can be a great goal for us if we want to improve customer service efficiency, increase brand engagement, build trust, or provide more value to our audience.
To encourage dialogue and add value, the Quirky Momma Facebook page asks questions and shares relevant links and videos. "How old is your child and what kind of chores do they do?"
How to build community?
Always encourage conversations and keep the lines of communication open. Make connecting with the brand as easy and convenient as possible. Valuable communities require a huge amount of time and energy, so we need to be committed.
Share our passions with our community and inform people about our future plans. They will appreciate transparency, which will increase the chances of positive engagement. To further encourage interactions, consider linking our discourses to pop culture, current affairs and potentially controversial issues. Be careful, however, not to appear ignorant or offensive.
We can complement these efforts by giving our followers a voice. Share a user's post that is in line with our company's approach and let our fans share their views. User-generated content appears more trustworthy in the eyes of followers.
For example, DesignSponge encourages Instagram followers to create photos based on an ever-changing hashtag that defines the theme.
4. Listening to the audience, identifying their interests
Social media is a great opportunity for businesses to get to know their audience through social listening, which means monitoring conversations on the network, gathering relevant information, commenting on purchase intentions. Sharing information through social media is public, which provides a great research opportunity for marketers. By monitoring conversations, emotions and comments, you can get a good idea of how your audience feels about a particular topic.
"Social listening" is a great social media target if you want to promote a new product that does not yet have a market, or if you want to focus on a specific niche market. Social listening is something that should always be used, as we are always learning something from our audience.
Follow up on conversations about brand mentions and respond to as many interactions as possible to encourage conversations about the brand. Use social monitoring tools like Mention or Hootsuite so you'll always know when someone mentions your brand.
Arby's has put a lot of emphasis on listening to its community, which has helped the Arby's social team to identify a large group of users who really like the sauce. These people tweeted about how they'd love to take a bath in the sauce, or how much they hate it when they forget to add sauce to their order. To capitalise on this trend, the brand launched the hashtag #Saucepocalypse. Finally, Arby's introduced bottled sauce that consumers can buy directly. To support the launch of the product, Arby's launched an integrated #Saucepocalypse advertising campaign.
One of the important tasks of Facebook management is to properly define your social media goals before figuring out what strategies you need to employ. A systematic process of setting goals can help us track the right metrics so we know how successful our efforts are in achieving a specific goal.
Source: socialmediaexaminer.com