How to Use Social Media for Your Business Marketing Plans?

Social media is an important tool for businesses to use in their marketing plans. Most actions on social media are free. They provide you with a great way to gain visibility and brand recognition. You can also get a lot of interaction on social media for business. However, what do you do to ensure that your social media marketing plan is solid.

Audit your current social media presence

Before you think of where you’re going, it’s good to take a step back to see where you currently are. When auditing your social media for business, you should look at a few areas.

These are:

• Which networks you’re currently active on,
• Whether those networks are optimized with photo and cover images, website URL, descriptions, images, and more,
• Which networks bring you the most value,
• And how do your profiles compare to your competitors’ profiles.

Document who your ideal customer is

You need to get specific here. For example, if you identify your ideal customer as parents, that’s good; but, if you can identify your target market as a parent that lives in the United States, is between 30 and 50 years of age, earns between $50,000 and $75,000 a year and is primarily on Facebook, well, then you’re onto something good. This will help you determine the best social media networks to focus on and what marketing campaigns and content to create. Even the best marketers will fail if they are marketing to the wrong audience. Try answering the following questions to help you come up with a highly focused buyer persona:

• Age
• Location
• Job Title
• Income
• Problem Points that your business can solve
• Most used social media network.

If you can do that, your social media for business will be targeted and have the best ROI it can have.

Create a social media mission statement

Your social media mission statement drives your current and future actions. You’ll want to put some serious thought into it. Your social media for business mission statement will make it clear exactly what you plan to use your social media presence for. It should also reflect your brand identity. Please keep in mind your ideal customer when crafting your statement. A good example social media for business mission statement is “to use social media to educate current and potential customers about digital marketing, with a focus on social media marketing.” Once you have your statement documented, it’s easy for you to decide what kind of content to share and create.

If the content doesn’t align with your mission statement, rewrite the content. Businesses that post randomly without a guiding mission will fail.

Identify key success metrics

How do you determine if your business social media efforts are successful? This isn’t just related to how many followers you get; it relates to the money you’re generating from your social media accounts. It’s difficult to rationalize spending money on social media if you’re not improving your bottom line.

Here are a few metrics to consider:

• Conversion rate
• Time spent on website
• Reach
• Brand Mentions
• Sentiment
• Total Shares

Most social media networks have ways for you to figure out this data. If not, you can use a tool like Hootsuite or Sprout Social that will help you get these metrics.

Create engaging content

This is the last step we’ll deal with in this blog post. Many businesses actually jump to this step first. We include it last because it’s the most important one and it should not a be done until you understand all the other steps. Posting to social media for business is fun. Well, at least it’s supposed to be. Now that you know who your ideal customer is and you’ve created your social media mission statement, it should be a straightforward process for you to create content that relates to your audience and your mission. What exactly is considered content? Well, content is a variety of things. It includes, but is not limited to:

• Images
• Videos
• Infographics
• Blog Posts
• Company News
• eBooks
• Interviews

Content is what fuels social media and if you have a content calendar that helps you determine what topics to focus on and when, you will be well ahead of the game and your marketing efforts on social media will be more effective.

Social media for business is a fantastic marketing tool. Although you may have a content calendar, understand that it’s not set in stone. As you keep your target audience and your mission statement in mind, you can be confident that your social media efforts are on their way to meeting the mark of helping increase your business’ bottom line. For more information on social media for business, stay tuned to our blog.

This content was originally posted at SoloSEO. Follow this DIY SEO blog for more content like this.