Social Media Strategy: Posts Are More Than Just A Pretty Face

Value of Strategy

Everyone is on social media these days… so can it really be that difficult to manage for a business? We’d like to argue yes.

While most of us may be active on social platforms, a business platform requires a little different thought process.

When we start with a client, we always take into consideration the whole picture: our goal and our audience. Without these things, it’s hard to make a significant impact on social media with a real return.

Audience

This is one of the most important starting points for social media. Knowing and understanding your audience is how you know what kind of posts will resonate, what language will communicate the message best, and what visuals will grab their attention. This is a foundation for creating effective posts.

Goal

For most people, posting on social media is a way to show their friends and family what they’ve been doing. It’s a way to represent themselves in the online world.

For businesses on social media, this is also the first layer to their goal (specifically organic but you can check out the different goals of paid social media on one of our other posts). We call this brand awareness. By consistently communicating with your audience, you allow them to get to know your brand and give them a reason to value it. Just like getting to know a friend, the more the audience gets to know a business, the more they begin to trust them and integrate them into their lives.

The Results

And then just like a friendship, social media goals can grow past the initial “get to know you” stage into something more in depth. Once you build that base, your brand has the credit to actually start speaking into the audience’s lives. For example, “I think you would really benefit from this product”, or “take my advice on how to establish your social media presence”.

Of course, there are a lot of other goals than just brand awareness or sales, but it’s important to always start with a baseline of showing an authentic brand — no matter what service or product you offer. In today’s clutter of internet messaging and social media advertisements, genuine interaction is rare. And that kind of interaction, whether you are mostly online or in person, will establish value that goes far beyond one post.