10 Ways To Build an Effective Social Media Strategy

If you've decided that you want to get serious about using social media to market your business, it's important to take the time to develop a social media strategy. Creating and executing a strategy will ensure you're getting the best return out of the time and resources you invest into social. So if you want to craft a strategy that's going to help you succeed, here's what you need to do:

Understand Who You're Targeting
Just because there are over a billion people on Facebook doesn't mean you should try to connect with all of them. The best way to use social media is to narrow your scope and only focus on users who are actually in your target demographic.

Put Time Into Creating Great Content
When it comes to social marketing, content plays a key role. However, simply pumping out lots of content isn't going to cut it. Instead, you need to make it a priority to create awesome content that people will find interesting and engaging.

Utilize Multiple Platforms
There's a lot of value in creating a presence on multiple social media platforms. Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest and LinkedIn all have proven track records of helping businesses grow. While it's easy to understand that different platforms allow you to connect with different audiences, plenty of businesses get overwhelmed by the thought of managing multiple social media accounts. Fortunately, a social media dashboard can make it much easier to track and manage more than one account.

Use the Same Branding Elements
Although you may share different content through your various social platforms, it's a good idea to keep elements like profile pictures and tag lines consistent. This will make it easy for people to identify your brand regardless of where they encounter you online.

Get Creative
While there are plenty of best practices, don't be afraid to experiment with different approaches to sharing to see how well they perform.

Focus on Engagement
Make it a priority to actually connect with your followers on a regular basis. This will remind them that there is a real person behind your business.

Stick with 70-30
A big part of an effective social media strategy is to find the right balance between keeping people interested and promoting your business. The best way to strike this balance is with the 70-30 rule. By limiting your self-promotion to 30% of your updates and using the rest to share things that are genuinely fun or interesting, you'll get far better results than if all you did was promote your business.

Review Your Social Media Analytics
Looking at your social media analytics data on a regular basis will do a lot for helping you to guide all of your marketing efforts.

Stay on Top of Your Industry
There are a lot of social media monitoring tools that can help you keep an eye out for trends within your industry. By staying on top of those things, you'll be able to position yourself as an authority figure within your industry.

Don't Be Afraid to Change
If something in your strategy isn't working as well as you would like, don't be afraid to try a new approach. Consistently reviewing and revising will allow you to keep your efforts moving in the right direction.
If you put everything we covered above into action, you'll be very happy with the social media strategy you're able to develop and the positive impact that it has on your business.

This is the syndicated copy of an original article posted at SendSocialMedia.com. Interested in learning more? Visit SendSocialMedia.com/blog

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