A social media strategy is important to your overall growth plan! Here are 5 key takeaways from our strategy and proof in the numbers!
over 15000% growth on Instagram Reach!
1. Set Your Social Media Strategy Goals!
We love a good SMART goal for our social media strategy! Specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely goals are a great way to give yourself goals with a purpose. Once you’ve laid out your goals, you can write down steps to accomplish the goal(s)! Taking baby steps is sometimes the best thing you can do, but being able to watch how those steps affect measurable factors lets your stay flexible and pivot to the best action plan!
2. Plan, plan, plan!
Speaking of planning, if you go into anything unprepared, you’re going to put a lot of energy into a lot of nothing! Creating content can be a chore, and a lot of small businesses don’t feel like they have the time or energy to put into it! When they do think of their social media content, it’s a last-minute, rushed task that makes the audience feel like they aren’t worth your efforts… We at Forward Digital Marketing sit down once a month to write out a very overarching plan to guide us. This plan is not rigid, but it gives us a base to build off of!
3. … But don’t over plan!
The reason we don’t give ourselves a hard and fast plan is because trends change fast on social media! In our monthly plan, we create a set amount of evergreen content and then leave room for trends that pop up throughout the month! Another great tip for your small business is to set “fallback” content days! Don’t know what to post on a Thursday? Have an already set theme for that day that you can quickly grab or make content for without feeling like you are starting from scratch.
For example, we at Forward Digital Marketing have Wednesday scribbled down as “Trend Alert Wednesday!” When we do not have any content plans for that day, we can quickly default to doing a trend breakdown. This saves us a few minutes and helps keep us sane during a busy week of content making!
4. Check Your Insights!
Once we’ve posted anything, we check out insights! Now, we do this for a living so how often we check is going to be greater than how often you need to check! When posting content, you should always look back at the insights 24 hours and 7 days later. This will give you a better understanding of what your audience likes and does not like. If you keep posting things that are getting low engagement, your audience is going to zone you out.
If you watch your insights and see that carousel posts are more successful with your following, then in your plan you should add more posts like that! Keeping an eye on the analytics is going to give you valuable, measurable feedback! This helps you reach your SMART goals set at the beginning of the process.
5. Remember, It’s the Internet.
One of the biggest takeaways with social media is that it is the internet… the internet can be a wild place full of unique personalities, robots, and ever-changing algorithms. What works one month, may not work as well the next! It can be an overwhelming place of confusion, but as long as you are putting in the time to plan and watch your insights, you’ll be more prepared to face whatever is changing! Another way to stay on top of all of the news is to follow trusted industry experts!
Most of us are on social media personally, so why not add a few educational and helpful small business tools to your feed! Forward Digital Marketing is one to follow! We work hard to research the changes, the growing pains, the successes, and the trends so you don’t have to! We take one more thing off of your to-do list. Still, feeling overwhelmed by the idea of building and posting content monthly, weekly, or daily?! Hire us as your social media management team! We build your monthly posting schedule based on your insights and audience. You give us a few photos and we do the rest! It’s just one more way Forward Digital Marketing can serve you!
