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Today businesses of all types and sizes depend on social media for a considerable part of their marketing activities. But what differentiates a successful social media campaign from one that does not produce the desired results for the business? Much. We’ll discuss in the post the key components of a good social media strategy and the considerations you should make while formulating one.

Like traditional marketing, social media marketing also can’t take a ‘one size fits all’ approach.

The issues with implementing the “blanket strategy” are:

1. The audience you attract won’t be specific to your niche and industry, which means that while you’re getting lots of follows, the people you attract may not be interested in buying your product

2. All the effort you spend on creating content will be of no effect and the resources you invest in creating non-specific content will also go to waste

To avoid these pitfalls, the content you create needs to be customized in accordance with the requirements of your business.

Let us look at some important components of a social media strategy.


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The right social platforms

There are many social media platforms available for businesses. Some are well known and have millions of users, while others are specific to businesses and cater to niche audiences. Before you begin any social media marketing activity it is recommended that you identify the social platforms that work best for you and formulate a specific strategy for each. A crafts company may benefit from Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter, while a recruitment firm may want to choose

LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. To understand the utility of a social platform for your business consider these points:

  • Who is your target customer and what are their education levels and age groups?
  • What social platforms do they use, and what are their interests and needs?
  • When are they most active on social media
  • What types of posts receive a high level of engagement?

Once you understand your target audience and their use of social media you can easily choose the right social platforms for your business and formulate the ideal plan to reach out to your target customers.

Great content

It is also important to publish the right type of content on your social profiles. The trick is to not just provide witty content, which might not do your business much good other than perhaps getting a few shares or retweets, but to also share useful content to achieve productive engagement with them. Not being able to provide the right content is not an excuse anymore with the availability of so many useful content discovery tools available:

  • Content discovery tools like Feedly and Flipboard can be good places to search for content to share.
  • You can also use DrumUp, a free social media content discovery and social media scheduling tool, that can help you find and share posts relevant to your business from a clean, simple dashboard
  • Imgur is a great place to find witty and humorous visual content.

Good content is relative to an audience! It is important to experiment and find out what sticks and clicks with yours.

Analysis and improvisation


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Businesses also need to constantly analyze their social media and content marketing strategies to gauge the level of success of their social media campaign. Important questions to ask and get answers for:

  • Do you see your audience increasing in number?
  • Do you enjoy better engagement with your audience?

You could do this with the aid of social media analytics tools. Based on your analysis, you need to tweak or enhance your social media activities. Do not accept stagnation – amp up activities that are bringing results, and eliminate those that are not working for your social media marketing campaign. The key to success on social media lies in learning from and growing with each campaign.

Note: This post was originally published on Mar 13, 2015 and has since been updated with additional information.

Photo Credit: Jason Rhode via flickr