How could you build a better social media strategy?

In my previous blog post I’ve stressed the danger of building a social media strategy on the wrong premises or with the wrong expectations. Now, let’s review a few ways to do it right.

First, you need to Monitor and Measure your activity and your audience on your social medias. The number of likes, tweets, shares, the demographics and location of your audience, the content triggering action, the key influencers. All this data needs to be collected and analyzed. The good news is that free tools like HootSuite, Klout, Social Mention, Twitter Analytics, Facebook Insights or Keyhole could help you do just that, and a digital agency could help you analyze and even collect that if needed.

But data is not enough. To get actionable input from this data, you must build the right audience and keep it.

Here are a few from Entrepreneur and Forbes contributor John Rampton:

• Build a strong brand image around your business values and make sure users understand everything you’re doing is aligned with it
• Be consistent. Based on your industry and content, your audience may have different expectations but you need some consistency in your activity. For example, The New York Times audience is probably expecting more from them than the French Embassy in the US. You may want to rely on tools that schedule and host all of your accounts in one place, like HootSuite, Buffer, or SproutSocial
• Target the right social networks. Not all social networks may serve your product marketing or the message you want to deliver. Twitter is definitely more appropriate for the WSJ than Pinterest. Some platforms are also better for specific age ranges, etc.
• Provide relevant and new content. Differentiation is critical, though not easy. A good way of tailoring content for your audience is by customizing it for your products. One our clients offer recipes with their products via their social networks. There are tons of recipes online, but these ones definitely have value for the audience

Finally, diversify your digital channels. Have a multi channel approach to digital communications and differentiate your channels appropriately. Mark Bonchek from thinkORBIT suggests distinguishing:

• Paid media: they deliver your content to an audience. This is traditional advertising and sponsorship
• Earned media: your content is exposed to an audience by influencers and reporters. This is public relationships and word-of-mouth
• Owned media: you have full control over the user’s experience and content and over the data generated by their usage. This is traditionally company websites, blogs, and newsletters. The key characteristics of such media are the following elements:
  • An engaging and valuable content,
  • A living community of users, and
  • A context that turns a transactional experience into a connected experience with the audience.

Though social media may be looked as owned, it’s actually more of a mix of earned and paid media unless these 3 elements are created. The goal should be to diversify but more importantly to make sure your owned medias are at the forefront of your inputs when designing your social media strategy.