HAPPY NEW YEAR! Wondering what to do now that it’s 2015? It’s time to start the year fresh by re-evaluating your social media presence and fine-tuning your efforts. If you aren’t on social media already, you’ll want to incorporate it into your business and marketing plan immediately. Because guess what? Your audience is on social media. And if you aren’t, you’re missing out on connecting with them!
As social media experts, we want to help you make 2015 your best year yet (in regards to your social media marketing). So follow along as we walk-through our 7-step social media strategy checklist.
Step 1: Audit your current presence
Review each of the social media channels on which your brand has a presence. Are your efforts getting you the results you want? If the answer is yes, then a yearly review never hurts. It’s good to know what you’re doing and if it’s working. If the answer is no, then you’ll want to tweak some things to get the desired results you are working toward.
Step 2: Review successful competitors
Take a look at what others in your industry are doing (especially your closest competition), and check it against your own social media presence. If there is anything to emulate, incorporate it into your 2015 marketing strategy.
Step 3: Identify your desired target audience
You’ll want to spend some time re-identifying your target demographic, as it may have shifted over time. Make necessary adjustments to your audience to ensure that you are continuing to market to the right people in the upcoming year.
Step 4: Develop an editorial calendar
The best way to approach your 2015 social media marketing plan is to start with developing an editorial calendar. For example, pull together information about a year-at-a-glance. You’ll want to identify important dates from January to December to help guide your overall content strategy. This helps you pre-plan and prepare for the upcoming months before you hit the 1st of the month. After you’ve completed the editorial calendar, it’s best to look at creating a weekly content series. Your weekly content series will lay out topics and ideas for weekly posting. This allows you to create content in advance and schedule posts so that you won’t have to always post on the spot. Once you’ve got both the editorial and the weekly content series, you can plan your monthly content calendar by incorporating the two together. We recommend having content ideas laid out over the next month to help guide you through the upcoming week, entire month, and year.
Step 5: Execution
As you plan to have a social media presence, you’ll want to make sure that you have the time and resources to put in a good effort. You’re better off focusing on a few core social channels than trying to be on everything if you haven’t got the time and energy to put into the routing posting and regular maintenance that social media management requires. You’ll want to make sure that you’re posting daily as well as monitoring the community.
Step 6: Ads
Spending a little money to get in front of the right audience is going to become more of a necessity as social media channels advance their algorithms. But luckily, you can go a long way with a small budget. The target options have greatly increased our ability to closely narrow down exactly who you are intending to target. If you haven’t been experimenting with Facebook Ad Campaigns or Promoted Tweets, it’s something you’ll want to look into in the New Year.
Step 7: Reporting
And lastly, don’t forget to take advantage of all of the wonderful reporting tools that are available on each of the social media platforms – Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics, Pinterest Analytics, Iconosquare, and more! Plan to review your metrics monthly to help shape future goals for your social growth.
Read these seven steps again. And then again! You want to make sure that you are making the most out of your social media marketing for 2015. We practice these steps for managing our client accounts, so we know they work. We wanted to share them with you so that you can set yourself up for social media success in 2015.
Good luck!