Develop A Social Media Strategy

The heading of this post alone sounds pretty boring, doesn’t it? When I first did the research for this article I stumbled over the POST model and thought about adding it to this post. Let me give you a small excerpt:

To perform a successful advertising social media campaign, you need a sophisticated strategy. If you have now decided to focus more on this area, you should know that you need to do a targeted group analysis called POST:

• People – target group (Which visitors are interested in my product?)
• Objectives – Objectives (What will be achieved with my action?)
• Strategy – Procedure (how to I reach my set goal?)
• Technology – Technology (What do I use to achieve the specified goal such as video marketing, free e-books, Facebook, Twitter?)

Does that sound engaging? No, obviously not – in short, you should develop a strategy where you add your readers (the people) into one group with objectives, strategy, and technology. To be honest, that doesn’t sound right to me. After all, social media marketing is just about the people and about how to get them to like you, isn’t it? So let’s dig into a more interesting instruction to leverage social media for your business. You wouldn’t call “my way” most probably a social media strategy but I wonder if you have to.

Social Media Strategy For Humans

The most important thing for your online business is still the content. Valuable content will certainly lead you to lasting success. All content that you post on Twitter, Facebook and Co, will be the short version of the content of your website or maybe an extension with questions, anecdotes about yourself or your family, or simply a call to action to come over to your website and give you their opinion.

After all -if you are just posting a link without a comment this would be for your fans or those who could be your fans, pretty boring.

Therefore, I post next to the actual link to my latest post as well a question about the topic, a quotation from the text or ask my readers directly what they think about the subject. So I have a lot more interaction on my Facebook page and also on my website, since readers are welcome to tell me their ideas.

You should be in contact with your readers daily. I always try not only to post but also to respond  to one or the other Tweet and answer questions such as on Facebook. Of course, this should not take too much time. But I think it’s important that you exchange information with others and not only “throw” some links at them. If I “like” a page then I do not want to get only links but I want to get in contact with this person, hear from him, know what he is doing and so on. When I see my readers as friends I know exactly what they value and what they want.

The rule is simple: Treat them as you want to be treated. Very easy social media strategy, right? 😉

I picture it like this: when I walk through the town and see in a shop window a beautiful bag then I take a picture and show it to my friends later if I’m not sure if I should buy it. So who treats his readers as friends, will automatically share with them content that is relevant and interesting for them.

A good mix is important. I also post links to other informative articles and quotes that I have found. I also post vouchers, special offers…. that I am interested and could also be interesting to my readers.

As you can see, this is not necessarily a sophisticated strategy but comes more likely  naturally.

This “strategy” works on all social media channels. I usually focus at one or two social media channels at a time. This tip is definitely good for your health. You might go crazy otherwise because places like Twitter are “loud” and are busy all day that you don’t miss anything. Once you have your basics then it is of course much easier. But if you want to build three social media accounts at the same time, this will not only cost too much time to get anything else done, but also you just will feel too overwhelmed quickly and just stay away from any of these sites. Therefore, I always focus on one or two. As soon as I have won a certain number of friends, I start to focus on another site.

Nevertheless, at the beginning I register my domain name with all channels, so that the user name is consistent on all sites.

I also try to limit the time I work every day on my account because as I mentioned before, otherwise I can not create content for my site or do other things. If you post on your accounts regularly, even ten minutes a day are completely sufficient.

Tip: My Calendar reminds me in the morning, noon and evening that I should stop by on Facebook or Twitter. Once the window comes up, I finish my job and look if I may make one or more comments or whether I can make a post by myself.

Really, that is absolutely enough. Your readers also have another life beside your blog, Facebook, Twitter and Co. 😉

If you want to learn more about social media marketing, join us at the Living For Mondays Academy!

Hope to see you there!

Filed in: Blog • Traffic Generation
Tagged with: social media • social media marketing • social media strategy