Is your social strategy working?

What does your social strategy look like? Do you have one?

Being successful with social media means you absolutely need to have some sort of strategy in place. This is what is going to make it easier for you to keep up on your social media, and also make you more successful financially. Now my hope is that your answer is yes, you have some sort of strategy going. If you don’t. Stop reading and go take care of that first!

I’ve told you before how to figure out your strategy…

• Do you know who your target audience is?
• Do you have your marketing goals clearly identified?
• How much time and energy can you realistically commit to social media? Do you have the time, or do you need to outsource? 

But now, how do you know if it’s working? How can you check? Are you using old tactics that were popular years ago? Do you need to bring your strategy up to date? These questions are especially important to ask yourself when it comes to Instagram. After all, this is a favorite platform for entrepreneurs and business owners. 

DO AN AUDIT

So first things first…audit your Instagram! This means looking at your past strategy rather than your future. Chances are, you’ve been on the platform for a while and may be using some outdated strategies. By bringing yourself up to date you’ll make sure to attract more of the right audience. 

Are you doing any of these still? Time to lose these tactics…

• Don’t follow people just for the sake of trying to get them to follow you. You should choose the accounts you follow with intention. You should be following people that are going to help get you closer to your target audience. Focus on community, not quantity. 
• Trying to increase your engagement by grouping with other people who will share your posts, like, comment, and vice versa. Essentially they are trying to boost your content and you are trying to boost theirs. This can really hurt you. It can damage your credibility, and if Instagram catches on, they can penalize you.
• Group giveaways may be tempting, but aren’t a good idea. By grouping with other brands, making it a requirement that you need to follow each brand in order to enter, or asking people to tag someone who in turn needs to follow all the accounts as well is really just creating engagement that doesn’t mean anything. Who knows what type of audience you’ll attract from something like this? Likely it won’t be your ideal customer, and your time and efforts are best spent elsewhere.

HERE IS WHAT YOU SHOULD FOCUS ON INSTEAD

• Your bio: Make it appealing. If people want to engage with you or follow you, they are going to check out your bio. So take a look at your photo, link, name and type of account you have and make sure it’s set up for your target audience.
• Your content: Are you promoting the right content? Are you using the latest and greatest features to do so? Keep up with the trends, make sure you’re using a good CTA, and make sure you are providing valuable content to your current followers so you can keep them and hopefully get them to buy from you. Don’t just focus on trying to attract new ones.
• Your DMs: As mentioned in this post, DMs are a great way to connect directly with your audience in a more secure manner. This is the place to ask for their email or contact information since it’s private. However, you may not be able to reply to every single DM you get. In this case, set up an automatic reply with a prompt directly in the message for them to add their email address to get more information.

So take a look at your strategy! What’s working? What do you need to let go of? If you need some help, in an episode of Rocky Mountain Marketing, I have a conversation with Jess Dewell on how to build an effective business strategy. According to her…“If our social media is not working, there’s a discrepancy between the messaging and the strategy of the social media and what we’re doing in the other parts of our business.”

If you need help with an audit or new strategy, reach out and let us do it for you!