How Fortune 500 Companies Plan Their Social Media Marketing
Let me ask you a question.
Can you deliver a convincing speech if you’re not sure about the message you want to communicate?
If you are not sure about your motive, you will simply confuse your audience, instead of convincing.
It’s the same with Social Media Marketing.
It’s not just content creation, having a clear plan allows you to work out a clear route for achieving those goals.
Here’s what you need to plan.
Goals & Objectives:
The first part of your social media marketing plan is the “goals and objectives”.
It shouldn’t be a vague one like “growing my business”.
You need something more specific and measurable to guide your social media campaign.
You can have more than one goal and the goals can differ from one platform to another.
For example, using Facebook to get new customers, Twitter for customer service, and LinkedIn for recruitment purpose.
In addition to your primary and secondary goals, come up with some short-term objectives.
These are time-specific, measurable, and achievable targets e.g. generating 30 new leads from Facebook in 30 days.
Audience
As a business, you might already know your target market, but you need to redefine your target audience at social networks.
Start from creating a persona or customer empathy sheet with the details like …
- Age Group
- Gender
- Education
- Income Level
- Ethnicity
- What’s their pain point?
- What do they want to achieve?
- What makes them happy, afraid, or sad?
This will help you produce content that clicks with your target audience.
Apart from targeting potential customers, you must also target bloggers, influencers, suppliers, or affiliates through Social Media.
Platforms:
The size or popularity of a network is important, but instead of choosing the biggest, or the fastest growing platform, choose the one that is more aligned with your goals and target audience.
For example, businesses looking to target upper management or professionals should choose LinkedIn over Facebook or Twitter. For businesses targeting housewives and mothers Pinterest is a better option.
The following infographic will help you decide.
Source: Sprout Social
Page vs. Group vs. Personal Account: Once you’ve finalized the platform, your next step is to choose the type of profile that you will use.
Most platforms allow businesses to create a business profile, which is different than the regular profile. Plus, there are other options like groups or communities that you can use.
For most businesses, having a business page will be the automatic choice, but in some cases, you can g with your personal profile, especially because the page updates are rarely featured in the news feed.
In fact, they have created a separate tab for Page Feeds.
However, personal profiles don’t have the features like Call to Action, email signups, Analytics, or Paid Advertisements.
You can also consider creating a group since Group posts have much better organic reach, but you’ll have to come up with a relevant theme or subject that will be of interest to your target audience. Also, groups will take a lot more time for moderation and management.
Posting Frequency & Schedule:
Posting frequency will usually be decided by the time and resources you have.
Earlier, it was “the more the merrier” but the advent of algorithm means that you should be focusing on quality instead of quantity.
Still, you need to maintain a minimum.
- For Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn, you should aim for at least one post a day.
- Except for a small “while you were away” section, Twitter is still showing the posts in reverse chronological order, so you must aim for 4 – 5 tweets in a day.
- Pinterest has recently devalued the re-pins or duplicate pins, so instead of wasting time on re-posting the old pins, try to post a unique one at least once a day.
You can choose the time of publishing by going to schedule.
Your dashboard will display all posts in the queue. You can drag the posts up or down to manage your posting schedule.