How to Craft an Effective Social Media Strategy
As social platforms have grown in popularity, so too has the importance of building an effective social media strategy. With one click of a button, companies have direct lines of communication to millions of consumers and potential consumers. While it’s now functionally easier than ever to reach people from all corners of the globe, that doesn’t mean it’s easy to connect with those people; it’s an important difference that many fail to grasp.

Just because Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram have a combined audience of nearly 2.85 billion users, that doesn’t mean all of them are eager to hear your message. In fact, most of them don’t even know your brand. This is why it’s essential to come up with a social media plan of attack, and commit to executing it well.
To have a successful social media strategy, it’s essential to plan meticulously, and stick to your message, even if it doesn’t seem to take hold at first. One of the worst mistakes you can make is to spend countless hours coming up with a plan, and abandon it within a few days of launching it.
To help with the process, below are four steps you can take to build a sound social media strategy.
1. Create a social media marketing plan before you start
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This may sound obvious, but far too often, people jump into social media with the thought “I’ll see what works and what doesn’t as I go.”
Don’t do that.
Craft a detailed strategy, and put forth your full effort. The first step is to create a SMART goals list.
Specific
Measurable
Attainable
Relevant
Time-bound
Creating a list like this will make it easy to track your progress, and allow you to easily see whether or not you need to alter your approach.
For example, if your chosen platform is on Twitter, a SMART goal could be to “increase our followers by five percent by the end of Q2.” In 11 words, you’ve communicated a specific goal, one that is measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. A SMART goals list doesn’t need to be an in-depth report, it just needs to convey the objective in a short sentence or two.