Social Strategy

     Social strategy and content creation is key when it comes to social media marketing. Knowing your target audience and brand can help develop the best strategies to use when trying to come up with a strong plan. 

    Creating a plan can start with conducting a social media audit in order to identify a bunch of helpful information and finding your target market. The audit will help you develop a SWOT analysis. A SWOT analysis allows you to understand your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Once you are aware of those, it is easier to define goals and objectives to move forward. Knowing your target market is very important. Factors that can change what you decide to post are influenced by who your largest audience demographic is. Whether it is age, gender or hobbies, many different things can determine where and what you post. A Facebook post targeting an old man will likely never be the same as posting on Instagram for a teenage girl. Which is why knowing your audience is so important in determining when, where and what you post. After the audit and determining your audience, setting goals is the next step to creating an effective strategy.

    Goals should include measurable objectives and metrics. Following the S.M.A.R.T. framework when setting a goal will always be necessary. This framework will set more achievable goals. Measurable objectives and metrics help make the goal measurable. The goal is broad and then the objectives make it more specific and metrics are even more specific than objectives. Having specific goals for each target market and each platform can be necessary when developing a strategy. 

    Factors that can impact your goals could be resources, roles and responsibilities that are allocated for social media or for the outcome you desire. Resources can refer to budget, number of employees or technology. Having a limited budget can create challenges with being able to produce the necessary content to meet your goals. I realized this during our simulation this week. I wanted to have a bunch of different posts, but the media was so expensive that it hindered my flexibility with platforms and amount of content. 

    Developing a strategy is challenging and involves many steps. These are just a few of the first parts in creating an impactful strategy.