Why is Social Media Strategy Important?

Creating an online presence for your business on social media with an effective social media strategy could be all it takes to increase potential revenue by at least ten-fold. Nowadays, with nearly everyone on social media sharing everything from pop culture references and memes, to business reviews and experiences, shining a positive light on your business could lead to significant exposure and growth from the millions that surf social media throughout the day.

These days, 72% of all Americans are on at least one social media platform. We know that the unprecedented event of COVID-19 is hindering businesses on a global scale. It’s important to unearth untapped potential by adapting to new strategies to a business afloat. Social media strategy can be the answer, at little to no expense.

In this article, we will discuss the definition of social media strategy. We will also discuss the advantages of the most popular social media platforms, and content worth creating and sharing. Hopefully, this will help your business thrive through this unpredictable time while making your job just a little bit easier.

Social Media Strategy

What is Social Media Strategy?

According to Hootsuite.com, a social media strategy is a summary of everything you plan to do and hope to achieve on social media. It guides your actions and lets you know whether you’re succeeding or failing.

It has never been easier to create a social media strategy. Many social media platforms provide tools to help you with your strategy. You can use tools to monitor analytics like which content is working, the best time of day to post and share content, and a variety of other metrics to help you boost your traffic. A social media strategy may take time to implement, but it will be worth it in the end for your business.

There are several benefits to having a social media strategy, including that a social media strategy allows you to take control of your brand online.

History of Social Media Strategy

The term social media was first coined in 1997 with networks like Sixdegrees.com being one of the first platforms for people to interact with other users worldwide. Social media came about only six years after the internet was publicly made available. Leading to the birth of more prominent platforms and the creation of Instagram and Facebook in 2006 and 2004, respectively, the idea of social media strategy is still fairly new. However, it is incredibly effective nonetheless for reaching consumers far and wide.

Sharing Other People's Content

Social Media Platforms

Each social media platform is designed for specific purposes. Each of these platforms are vastly different than the next. (Despite the common interface and structure that may appear similar across multiple platforms.) The most popular platforms to use for marketing your business are:

Facebook

Facebook is by far the largest social media platform worldwide with over 2.6 billion monthly users. That’s almost a third of the world’s population! Facebook has remained consistent with being the biggest and baddest network around, generally speaking. In addition to the incredibly useful analytic tools that Facebook offers for business-users, receptive posts, content creation, and interacting with your audience is incredibly fun, yet simplistically easy to monitor. If you need help with Facebook content creation, a digital agency can help you.

Twitter

Twitter for “tweeting” news and updates. (Or really any message worth broadcasting!) Twitter has an active audience of over 321 million users. These users are ready to read or share your post of 260 characters or less. Popular among the entertainment and e-commerce industries, Twitter is fast and easy to provide information, share visuals, and spread hashtags, and is a solid resource for building your online presence as long as you know how to use Twitter for marketing.

Instagram

As effective as visual stimuli are with keeping your audience interested and focused, Instagram’s interface is reputable for sharing and editing videos and images to show the personality of your business. However, out of Instagram’s approximate user base of 1 billion people worldwide, only a small percentage browse for business relevance. Instead, most scroll for eye-opening and thought-provoking visuals in their spare time.

Fortunately, for coffee shops, artists, and others who can showcase their creative products in a personable way that also represents their business in a colorful manner, it can prove superior in comparison to the more competitive platforms for businesses.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a platform well-known for reaching professional and specific audiences, ranging from job-hungry applicants to titans of numerous industries. It has a global user network of more than 706 million. While similar to Facebook’s interface of posting content, responding to comments, and updating profiles, the differences are solely based on LinkedIn being the prominent source for job seekers and professional networking. LinkedIn isn’t a platform to share funny memes or entertaining cat videos. It is for informative and business-related content and can reach relevant people in any industry. Generally, small businesses and B2B businesses succeed the most by using LinkedIn for marketing.

Social Media Content Sharing

Social Media Content Sharing

There are several things to keep in mind when posting content you create and when sharing others’ content. There are many tips for sharing content across different social media channels. Some of these tips include: 

  •  With each social media platform providing usefulness in each of their own ways, the content created to share from one platform to be copied and displayed on other platform(s) (also known as cross-posting) won’t always be effectively translated on a different platform. This is because of preferences that deem what’s favorable and aligned with the respective algorithms that the platform determines worthy of sharing. For social media content sharing across multiple networks, the actual content should be tweaked to cater towards the other platforms in a manner that’s user friendly and most similar to their content preferences.
  • A useful strategy for increasing brand exposure is cross-promoting with other businesses and users. This can lead to increased traffic for your business by promoting not just to your audience, but also the entity’s audience that you’re sharing content with.
  • Test out your content on the platform(s) of your choosing and change what’s necessary. Similar to designing content in a way that a specific platform favors in order to be broadcasted on a user’s newsfeed, another relevant variable is the time of posting. Both of these factors may take a bit of optimizing for the best results. Several social media planners such as Hootsuite are terrific for the tools that they provide for measured analytics on the times that your audience is most responsive.

Why Social Media Strategy is Important

Sharing Other People’s Content

It can be exhausting creating content that resonates with your audience on a regular basis. If you don’t possess the creativity to create the visuals or hardware to capture photos to help your messages come alive, don’t worry. Attaching and sharing other people’s content can give you the best of both worlds. However, there are a couple things to keep in mind when sharing other people’s content:

Give Credit

Perhaps the most important of the things to be aware of when sharing others’ content is to give credit. Everyone deserves credit for their work, even on social media. Just as you would never plagiarize or steal other people’s words, content and pictures operate under the same restrictions. Repercussions for copyright infringement come with harsh penalties, with fines ranging from $200 to $150,000 for each stolen work. If heavy fines weren’t enough to dissuade you from stealing, maybe the jail time often attached to these crimes will.

It’s your responsibility to obtain written permission from the owner, otherwise find another picture to use. There are many public domain websites that allow you to use their photos. You do have to make sure to give credit and attach a Creative Commons License. Other websites, like unplash.com or pexels.com, offer free photos that can be used for any reason, with or without credit. Either way, people deserve credit for their work.

Emphasize Your Message

When using or attaching another person’s content with your name or message, it’s important to use something equally compelling that makes your message and business’s personality blossom. The message you send is the important part. Whatever is used to attach to that message shouldn’t be the most eye-opening part.  Rather, it should emphasize your brand’s message. 

Sharing Social Media Content

Time To Strategize

With a wide array of social media platforms, free tools to help with monitoring, scheduling, creating content, and some strategies to help keep your fan base interested while attracting new followers, it’s time to plan your own social media strategy. Hopefully, this article helped you or your business by giving insightful ideas and knowledge for your own social media strategy. If you still need help,you can leave the strategy planning to professional social media strategists.

The professional team of strategists at SEO Design Chicago can help you. The team of professional strategists live and breath everything that has to do with social media content creation and strategy, and can be the professional team that provides the missing component. If you need help with your social media strategy, contact SEO Design Chicago today.

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