Effective Social Strategy: Digital branding brings business growth

Here we give the three most common essentials: product promotion, brand awareness and customer engagement.

So you’re working for a fairly large organisation and you are sure about the upper-management believing in social media and the immense possibilities it holds. If they don’t, then your first step would be to convince them first, for which, this article is going to prove useful as well. And make sure you make the upper management get a few points straight:

•    Social media is more about long-term commitment than a marketing gimmick.
•    You are not opting for social media strategies because it’s the in-thing!
•    Your primary goal is not to sell but building relationships.
•    There are more companies than not that are integrated to social media. It’s a staple in their Internet Marketing Strategies and communication plans, so emphasis of the social media strategy would be on developing a strategy that bridges at least one among the remaining gaps. Else, you might get sucked into the Advanced Link Building cavity.
The best social media strategies shall always be built upon three definite pillars:
?    Well-designed content.
?    Well-defined business goals:
?    Well spotted-out audience or target demographic.

Whether it is blogs, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest or Facebook, miss out or be a little less focused on any of the above, you’ll be in for a major spin! Don’t feel intimidated by the vast number of options, though. Craft your social media strategy putting together a few simple steps, one by one!

Start with defining your goals. Here we give the three most common essentials: product promotion, brand awareness and customer engagement. All the posts you create, all the messages you give must map back to the goals. Fix the metrics you will want to use for evaluating the efforts put. Is it through clicks, comments or reply-s, re-tweets or shares? The social media strategy must have all of them clearly defined.

Next comes picking the right outlet. Social media sites need content to run. The more numbers you choose; more will be your need for it. If you can’t produce that amount of content, it will stretch you too thin and will spoil all. Better, stick to one or two first and give it/them your all than running four things almost OK. For not just fresh content but also of varied flavours - on a regular basis! So pick the one(s) with a content format that fits the nature of your business. A rule of thumb to identify and find the right fit is choosing a social network site that’s most commonly used by your target audience.

For example, Facebook connects the readers to the posts through higher engagements with emotional stories and compelling images. For LinkedIn, B2B content (with a link to the post) rocks!

Content can’t be stale. Posting the same/exact content (including text) is prohibited! Varying content appeals! Memes, videos, guides, how-to -s, lists, research-based data...it applies to all!

Editorial calendar helps! Knowing what content to create, editorial calendars are for managing the content-production process. Social media sites or blogs, it keeps you updated about what and when to post where. It helps to create a balanced array of posts. These are available as tools. Writing different social media posts well ahead and well-scheduled result in systematic send-outs.

It’s good to know here that Tweeter needs more activity daily than Facebook; as much as 5-10 tweets a day compared to 5-10 FB posts per week! For LinkedIn, once per day should do all right; if you can’t, never less than 20 times monthly.

Bottom line: You are opting for social media because success comes from testing and experimentations. Any organization with an open, proactive culture is going to benefit the most from these strategies.