1. Introduction
Social media, a digital tool that enables social interaction and communication, has become an inescapable part of modern life. With billions of users around the globe, social media is a phenomenon that has evolved far past its original conception.
Besides its uses for social interaction, social media platforms have become an essential tool for brands to market themselves successfully, to a wide and highly-targeted audience. Building an online presence has become necessary for any company and with good reason. There are many aspects to social media that make it a perfect marketing tool; from its cost-efficient advertising to the ability to interact directly with consumers.
Millions of businesses are using social media as a core faction of its marketing strategy and if you haven’t already, this guide covers all the basics to social media marketing so that you can get started on promoting your business online.
What is Social Media Marketing?
Social media marketing is the act of utilising social media platforms to promote a business and its services and/or products, through various methods such as creating content, advertising, or community management. It is a varied process, entirely dependent on the individual business and each different platform.
Your content should be tailored to each platform; created specifically to cater to the users who frequent the app. Social media marketing has a focus on meeting and appealing to your target audience and convincing them to start a conversation with you.
With that, let’s first look into the different and most well-used social media platforms and some relevant statistics about their users.
| Platforms | Demographics |
| Monthly Active Users: 2.85 billion
Primary Audience: Gen X and Millennials Best Used for: Brand awareness, advertising, video marketing, user engagement, customer service Industry Impact: B2C |
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| Youtube | Monthly Active Users: 2.29 billion
PrimaryAudience: Millennials and Gen Z Best Used for: Brand awareness, video marketing, entertainment Industry Impact: B2C |
| Monthly Active Users: 1.38 billion
Primary Audience: Millennials and Gen Z Best Used for: Brand awareness, advertising, visual-focused content, user generated content, customer service Industry Impact: B2C |
|
| Monthly Active Users: 310 million
Primary Audience: Baby boomers, Gen X, Millennials Best Used for: B2B marketing, advertising, business development Industry Impact: B2B |
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| Snapchat | Monthly Active Users: 514 million
Primary Audience: Gen Z Best Used for: Advertising, video marketing Industry Impact: B2C |
| Monthly Active Users: 397 million
Primary Audience: Millennials Best Used for: Brand awareness, customer service, public relations Industry Impact: B2C and B2B |
While social media is vast and it may sound like a good idea to utilise all platforms, the best course of action would be to first determine your target audience and choose the appropriate platforms for your business.
Facets of Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is a varied tool, with many facets making up what it is. There are many elements that can round out your social media strategy, for it to be an efficient, complete, and successful one.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is the process of creating and publishing content — whether it’s images, videos, or articles — with the aim of sparking an interest in a brand or its products and services without explicitly promoting these goods.
When you, as a brand, create content that is meant to be informational, educational, or entertaining, you are carrying a type of content marketing.
While content marketing can be performed on other channels, it is a sizable faction of social media marketing where you have to continuously create content to gain and retain followers.
As an example, take a look at one of the Instagram posts from WeBarre, a Singaporean fitness studio. It is a simple image with an inspirational quote that does not prominently feature their brand or their services.
When you create content like this, you offer more to your audience than just promoting yourself. While it is a simple concept, creating posts like this often works well in your favour.
Sponsorship
A sponsorship on social media refers to the act of hiring a public figure to promote a brand’s products or services on their personal social media accounts. Sponsorships are typically used for specific ad campaigns, to overtly promote a brand.
With sponsorships, you can reach an even wider audience that still remains relevant if you choose the right figure. Working with sponsorships can increase your brand awareness, lead generation, and, most importantly, conversions.
Sponsorships differ from influencer marketing, explained below, in that influencer marketing tends to be more subtle in its selling ability whereas sponsorships act as another form of advertising.
Influencer Marketing
As social media, namely Instagram, grew in popularity, the rise of social media influencers followed soon after. Influencers are individuals with typically large followings who can be contracted to promote your products or services to their followers.
Influencer marketing entails hiring these individuals to create promotional content around your brand, without sounding as though they are pushing a sale. They promote your business in a natural and genuine manner.
As influencers are not typically famous by other means, their followers will perceive them as down-to-Earth and more trustworthy. As such, they’re more likely to trust their product recommendations and engage in your business themselves.
Community Management
On social media, you should aim to foster a sense of community among your brand and followers; a space for fans to interact, share their thoughts, and become brand advocates.
Community management is the act of fostering and nurturing this brand community, through understanding your audience as well as engaging and communicating with them. This includes replying to comments made, responding to direct messages (DM), and sharing user-generated content.
When you gain a community online, your relationship goes beyond brand and consumer, leading to a humanisation of your brand. This leads to having a strong and loyal fanbase who could in-turn become advocates of your brand, spreading word and positive reviews for your brand.
Check out this great example of a community management task from WeBarre. While a comment like the one above may seem like something that doesn’t necessitate a reply, it is best practice to actively reply to all comments on your post. Even a simple reply like the one from WeBarre can help your audience feel seen and heard by you.
Advertising
With social media, advertising has become a streamlined process that is both highly-targeted, to guarantee the highest probability of conversions, and cost-efficient, to allow any business to advertise easily.
Many social media platforms, Facebook and Instagram in particular, have specialised methods of advertising and targeting which simplify the process. Although it may be difficult to run an advertising campaign on social media for the first time, the process has been simplified on various platforms. If you’re looking to run your first advertising campaign on Facebook, we break down the steps in our Beginner’s Guide to Facebook Marketing and Advertising.
This is a great example of a simple yet effective Facebook ad from WeBarre. The image used is clear and high quality while the text is succinct and gets the point across. Additionally, they used an appropriate CTA which is the “Sign Up” button, since their main product offering are fitness classes.
User-Generated Content
User-generated content (UGC) refers to pieces of content that are created by users, typically followers of your business. User-generated content can be anything from images and videos to reviews and testimonials.
With user-generated content, you can share these pieces of content on your business’ accounts to gain a deeper trust with your audience. For users who have created their own content about your business, sharing their posts can make them feel seen and appreciated by you.
For your followers, seeing UGC on your page could convince them to trust your brand more as it serves as a testament to your great service. Additionally, seeing UGC could convince them to create their own as they hope to be featured on your page.
Encouraging user-generated content can lead to higher engagement rates as well as a better relationship with your audience.
Using another example from WeBarre as earlier, here they have compiled images of their customers wearing a brand shirt. When you post user-generated content like the one above, you allow your audience to feel included while also encouraging other audience members to create their own content for a chance to be featured on your page.
Forum Contribution
Forums, such as Reddit or Quora, are communities of users who are interested in the same topic or hobby where they seek out help, advice, or information from others. Forums can be a great way to market your business, if you know how to use it.
You can contribute help or information to users who pose queries on forums that are relevant to your business or industry. When you do so, you provide exposure to your business while also establishing yourself as knowledgeable, helpful, and trustworthy.
Reviews
With digitalisation, searching for reviews on businesses and their products or services has never been easier. Users can share their thoughts on their personal accounts, on your page, or even on dedicated review websites.
Positive reviews are always something you should highlight and share with followers, to reinforce the great services or products you provide.
In this post from WeBarre, they highlight a testimonial from a former participant who raves about a previous class. When you highlight reviews and testimonials, you form a deeper trust with your audience as they are more likely to engage in your services after reading a positive review.
Why You Should Use Social Media Marketing
There are numerous benefits to marketing on social media, which is why it’s so highly recommended and often deemed necessary.
Brand Awareness
There is an estimate of 4.2 billion users on social media around the world, as of 2021. Knowing that, it’s easy to see why marketing your business on social media is so crucial. With the sheer amount of people on social media, there is an endless audience that you can promote your business to, leading to an increase in brand awareness.
When you’re able to properly tailor content to your target audience, you can drive people to visit your social media accounts or even straight to your website, through strategic linking within your posts, comments, or in your bio.
Additionally, it’s easier to find users who could be interested in your brand through the helpful targeting options for advertising that is available on different platforms.
Meaningful Relationships with your Audience
Nowadays, audiences want more from brands than just being sold a product. They want a brand that is authentic, genuine, helpful, and entertaining. While that seems like a lot for one brand to be, the resulting relationship is entirely worth it.
When you hold a strong and meaningful relationship with your audience, it leads to brand loyalty that can’t be gained in other ways. Your audience will be more likely to trust you, continue buying your products or engaging in your services, and will recommend your brand to others.
User Engagement
Social media gives you the opportunity to engage with your audience at any time, as soon as you log on, and vice versa. When done correctly, social media marketing allows your audience to engage directly with you through likes, comments, shares and other functions.
When users engage with your brand, there are a host of benefits within that as well. Instagram, for example, prioritises posts on a user’s main feed by engagement rates. If an account or particular post performs well, it will be shown to more users who follow that account which can lead to a higher exposure and an even higher engagement rate. Accounts who receive higher engagement and contain relevant content to a user will also be shown in their “Explore” page, whether they follow the account or not.
Besides that, user engagement can also lead to a higher page traffic, following, and even conversions.
Generate Leads and Boost Conversions
Social media has become a great tool for lead generation and boosting conversions, to the point where various platforms have implemented measures, especially in their advertising tools, to help.
Lead generation ads are a standard feature on both Facebook and Instagram’s advertising center, which allow brands to generate and collect leads easily. As for boosting conversions, Instagram’s Shop function makes it incredibly simple for users to purchase products directly from a business’ account.
Customer Service
With social media allowing you to interact directly with your audience, the ease of communication allows for perfect customer service to be carried out. Users can relay their questions, concerns, or feedback directly to you quickly and easily.
The important thing to note about using social media for customer service is that prompt responses are almost always expected by users. In a survey conducted by Khoros in 2020, it was discovered that an estimated half of social media users expect a response from businesses within three hours.
The benefit of having great customer service on social media is that your brand establishes itself as trustworthy, authentic, and helpful. When conducting customer service, be sure to be prompt, polite, and to answer any questions or concerns thoughtfully.
2 Core Pillars of a Successful Social Media Strategy
2.1.1 Understanding Your Audience
Create Customer Personas
A customer persona, also known as a buyer persona, is a fictionalised character that perfectly encapsulates all the qualities of your target audience. With a customer persona, your direction is focused and specialised across all departments, from marketing to product development.
Customer personas are important to create, as it influences your social media strategy and content deeply — to appeal to your audience, you need to know their wants or needs and their likes or dislikes. Additionally, a customer persona allows for easier advertising as you can create campaigns that are highly targeted which could possibly increase its success.
If you want to create a customer persona for your business, read through our guide here.
Understand Pain Points
Pain points are sources of grievances, related to your business, that your customers — current and prospective — may experience. Essentially, it is a need that has yet to be met by other businesses.
There are different kinds of pain points that customers may have and whether it’s dissatisfaction with customer service or a product that’s over-budget, these pain points can be solved.
Pain points can be identified through market research, such as surveys or focus groups, or, for a cost-efficient method, conducting research online.
A great way to conduct research is to look into your competitors, particularly their reviews. You and your competitors will have the same or similar target audiences which means there is a good chance they hold the same pain points. Are they doing anything wrong that doesn’t properly address their customer’s needs? Or is there something that all their customers appreciate, which you can then emulate in your own business?
When you have discerned their pain points, you gain a deeper understanding of your audience and can adjust your marketing strategy to fully address their needs.
Understand Online Behaviour
If you’re utilising digital marketing, you have to understand online behaviour in order to fully flourish. While users’ behaviours online will differ greatly, there are a few methods to gaining information that will be wholly beneficial.
2.1.2 A Well-Rounded Social Media Strategy
Define your Goals and KPIs
As with any aspect of digital marketing, you have to create a well-rounded and detailed strategy for social media in order to succeed. However, to create an effective strategy, you need to know what it is you want to achieve.
Your goals and KPIs are the measurable aims you hope to achieve through social media marketing. Social media KPIs are the values used to measure the success of your social media marketing efforts. Essentially, your KPIs are what bring you closer to achieving your goals.
However, to create effective goals and KPIs, you must first understand the social media marketing funnel: TOFU, MOFU, and BOFU.
This funnel breaks down the journey your customers will take with your business, from first discovering your brand to becoming a loyal brand advocate.
At the TOFU (Top of Funnel) stage, AKA the discovery stage, users are being exposed to your brand and gaining interest which leads them to liking or following your page. They are browsing through your content and deciding you’re worth following. This section of the funnel is where brand awareness, and the posts that support it, come in.
Next, in the MOFU (Middle of Funnel) stage, AKA the consideration stage, users become more aware of your brand and content and are deciding whether to engage in your products or services. Advertising is important in this section of the funnel, as it serves as both a reminder of your brand and as a way to generate intent to purchase. Targeting features in social media advertising enable you to reach users who are already following you or may have previously visited your website.
Lastly, the BOFU (Bottom of Funnel) section details where users become customers, meaning a successful conversion has taken place. For the funnel to be complete, you have to further convince customers to become loyal brand advocates. In this stage, it is done through effective social media community management.
Now that you have an understanding of the social media marketing funnel, you can start to determine your goals and KPIs.
As mentioned earlier, goals are more general and may include some of the following examples:
- Drive more traffic to your website
- Increase brand awareness
- Generate leads
- Increase influencer mentions
- Boost brand engagement
However, KPIs are more specific and measurable, covering various aspects such as engagement, reach, and conversions which is why it should be measured against the social media marketing funnel. Some examples of social media KPIs may include:
- Page Likes/Follower Count
- Comments
- Shares
- Clicks
- Avg. Engagement Rate
When determining your goals and KPIs, it is important to remember what it is you want to achieve. Whether it is an increase in brand awareness or a higher conversion rate, your goals and KPIs need to reflect the social media marketing funnel.
2.1.3 Creating Content
The main appeal of social media is the abundance of content that is always readily available. Your audience will expect to receive content from you regularly, and especially content that provides more than just a promotion for your business.
When creating content, it has to be high-quality and relevant to your audience. Whether it is informational, promotional, educational, or entertainment, your content has to have a purpose. It is also important to diversify content types and refrain from sticking to the same format each time.
Most importantly, you have to be consistent with your content. While consistency around a routine and schedule for content publication is necessary, consistency across all content is crucial. You should have a brand style and tone that you use when creating content across all posts and platforms, so as to establish a working brand voice that your audience can familiarise itself with.
With content creation on social media, you have to remain consistent. For consistency on scheduling, check out our Social Media Calendar Template to plan ahead your posts. As for content consistency, take a look at our Content Guideline Template, where you can determine how your brand should appear in all content that is produced.
2.1.4 Listening and Engagement
With all content that is produced and the strategy you may create, your focus should always be on your au7dience. While the ultimate goal of social media marketing is to give your business the boost it wants, you do so by attending to your audience. As such, you have to engage with and listen to your audience as much as you can.
Engagement, as mentioned earlier, has a host of benefits associated with it. One of which is that you can learn what your audience likes and dislikes. Through interactions on your post, including likes, comments, and shares, you can discern what your audience wants and appreciates from you.
Additionally, another way to learn what your audience wants is through the act of social listening. Social listening is the process of tracking what your audience online is saying about your brand, competitors, and industry as a whole.
While this concept may seem similar to social media monitoring, the main difference is taking action. With social listening, you get direct and firsthand opinions from your audience which can be used to your advantage, regardless if it’s positive or negative. When you conduct social listening, it allows you to be proactive in your social media presence.
Social listening is important in any strategy as it provides you with valuable insight that can assist in taking steps to improve, increasing the positive sentiments towards your brand.
While the process of social listening may seem time-consuming, there are numerous tools available that help you monitor and consolidate all necessary mentions. In this guide, we highlight two well-known and efficient tools.
Awario
Developed in 2015, Awario has become one of the leading tools for social listening. A simple and easy-to-use software, Awario tracks all mentions of your brand and other chosen, related keywords across the web, providing valuable insight and market data.
The tool also provides helpful daily and weekly summaries, which can be beneficial to business owners who lack the time and manpower to constantly check for new mentions. With pricing that starts at $29 per month, we would recommend Awario to small businesses that may still be early in their marketing strategy.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a social media management software that also covers social listening. With a single dashboard for all of its features, the tool is extensive and covers many aspects of social media management.
One of the best features about Hootsuite is its ability to track mentions and conversations around your brand all over the world, and in any language. If you’re a business that conducts regional or international sales, we would recommend Hootsuite as the ideal social listening tool.
2.1.5 Analytics
When you carry out social media marketing, you would understandably want to understand how well you are performing and this is where analytics comes into play. Analytics is the process of gathering data about your accounts and your audience, and finding valuable insights within this information that can help you improve further efforts.
With social media analytics, you can find out what works best for your brand online and what appeals best to your audience. Analytics can cover information such as when is the best day and time to post to ensure maximum reach and engagement or even provide a deeper look into who your audience is.
In social media, everything is measurable and it is entirely necessary to delve into analytics to gain a thorough understanding of your online presence and ultimately, improve your performance.
2.1.6 Advertising
Advertising has been made much more accessible to businesses through social media and has become an integral part of social media marketing. Many platforms allow businesses to run advertising campaigns and have made the process seamless and cost-efficient. Additionally, advertising on social media can be highly targeted which allows you to reach users who would be most likely to engage in your business.
Out of the six previously mentioned social media platforms, the best for advertising would include Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Depending on your aims, advertising on social media can increase brand awareness through gaining likes and follows, generating leads or downloads, as well as increase conversions.
Advertising on social media has been proven successful for countless businesses, with millions of brands advertising on Facebook alone. As this is the main source of profit for platforms like Facebook and Instagram, these platforms ensure that their advertising capabilities are efficient and easy-to-use.
If you want to learn how to run a successful advertising campaign on Facebook, we have detailed the steps in our comprehensive Beginners Guide to Facebook Marketing and Advertising.
2.2 Common Mistakes and Misconceptions
While social media marketing may seem straightforward at first glance, there are many aspects that require careful planning and consideration. When not done thoughtfully, there are numerous mistakes one can make on social media.
1. Too Many Social Media Platforms
Some businesses may believe that utilising any and all social media platforms will increase the odds of them finding success online. However, when you stretch yourself too thin, you could find yourself struggling to keep up with the nuances of the different platforms.
Additionally, each platform is best used for different purposes. LinkedIn, as mentioned earlier, is the perfect platform for B2B marketing and should remain the focus if you’re a B2B company. If you choose to start a presence on Facebook or Instagram, you will find yourself with an inappropriate audience type, leading to a futile attempt at growing on social media.
2. Not Implementing a Strategy
As with any task you undertake, you need a well-rounded and fully-formed strategy before embarking on social media marketing. There are different components in a social media strategy that are wholly necessary to be effective.
Setting goals, conducting research, analysing engagement; all are required in order to succeed online. Without a strategy or plan, your social media presence could end up feeling incomplete and disorganised.
3. Not Understanding Your Audience
When you market on social media, everything you post should be created with your audience in mind. Your audience are the ones who can make or break your business and reputation and it is utterly important to cater to them.
Whether they are present or future customers, your audience is made up of users who are most likely to engage in your products or services and you need to give them a reason to stay on your profiles.
When you misunderstand your audience, you create content that they wouldn’t be interested in and ultimately, drive them away from your business. Online users crave content, and with the internet hosting a plethora of content, it is incredibly easy for them to find. Make yours unique, creative and, above all, relevant to them and their needs.
4. Irregular and Inconsistent Posts
People appreciate consistency throughout their lives, including on social media. When you post sparingly, users can grow disinterested and bored of your content which makes your brand forgettable in their eyes.
On the other hand, posting too much can also lead to content fatigue, leading users to feel overwhelmed and even annoyed by your posts.
As such, it is always best to avoid posting irregularly and especially, posting for the sake of posting. There needs to be a synchrony of your posts; it should never feel random or disorganised and instead, should be consistent and in line with your content pillars.
5. Too Much Promotional Pushing
If all you ever post is about your products and your services, users will start to view you as the pushy salesman who won’t leave them alone. Promotional content is never enough to keep an audience’s attention and should add value to their lives.
Whether it’s educational and informational or entertaining and casual, there needs to be diversity in your content. Offer more to your audience than what products or services your business may sell; provide something that can help them in their lives.
Your audience will grow to appreciate the helpful content you post, resulting in a strong relationship, and will also view you as a thought leader in your industry.
6. Lack of Necessary Skills
While social media marketing is available to anyone and any business, there are certain skills that not everyone may possess. When the sole social media manager or members within a social media team lack necessary skills, it could lead to a disjointed social media presence.
An example of such a skill would be content creation. When creating a social media post on Instagram or Facebook, the main attraction would be the key visual. However, if it is poorly made, such as being low-resolution or blurry and pixelated, users will not feel compelled to interact further and will continue to scroll.
When certain skills are lacking, the quality of your social media accounts go down and you get further from reaching your initial goals.
3. How to Create a Social Media Strategy
A social media strategy is an essential plan that is detailed and thorough, serving as a guide for your business’ social media marketing. With the goals and objectives you set in your strategy, you also have a definitive aim to achieve.
When creating a social media strategy, there are many aspects that you need to be aware of and that are entirely necessary to include. In this section, we break down the steps you need to undertake to create a successful social media strategy. We also have created a Social Media Strategy Template for you to take action.
3.1 Set Goals
The first step involved in creating an effective social media strategy is to determine your objectives and goals. Establishing goals is crucial, as it sets a standard to be achieved and allows you to efficiently measure your return on investment (ROI).
For your goals to be sufficient, they have to be SMART:
Specific: Be specific when setting goals and refrain from being vague about your aims.
Measurable: How will you measure your success? Pick a figure to which you can compare your progress to.
Attainable: Ensure all goals are realistic. For example, a goal of doubling social media followers may be unrealistic, depending on your current growth. Avoid setting goals that will be impossible to achieve.
Relevant: Your goals should align closely with your business objectives and not stray from what your aim as a company is.
Time-bound: Set a deadline for your goals to be achieved. Whether it is a month or a year, you need to set a timeline that fits the overall goal and the other items in the SMART framework.
This is the ideal framework to follow when establishing your social media marketing goals. As an example, a possible SMART goal for social media would be, “Increase the number of Instagram followers by 50% within the next three months.”
When creating a social media strategy and setting goals, it is important to understand what you hope to achieve by being on social media. Is it a higher brand awareness? Or an increase in lead generation?
When you know what you want social media to benefit you with, it becomes easier to set SMART goals and make the steps necessary to achieve them.
3. 2 Understand your Audience
The second step in creating your social media strategy is to understand your audience by building your customer personas. As it influences the rest of your strategy planning, this is an important step that cannot be left out or skipped.
As previously iterated, customer personas are important as it provides valuable insight on who exactly you are selling your brand to. When you create a customer persona, you learn your audience’s demographics, interests, pain points, and what their wants or needs are.
To create a customer persona, you need to create seven details for this fictionalised character.
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- Name: Give your persona a name that humanises them and encapsulates their character. For example, if your business is a gym or related to the fitness industry, you could consider calling your personas, “Muscle Mike” or “Protein Patricia”.
- Age: Think about the age range of your target demographic. Are you appealing to young adults in their early to mid-twenties? Or is your audience more mature, perfect for an age range of 45-65?
- Gender: While most companies would prefer to target both genders, customer personas have to be more specific so that your marketing campaigns can be tailored to be more enticing to that gender.
- Location: Which country are you marketing your business to?
- Area of Interests: What is your ideal audience interested in? Using the same example of a gym, their areas of interest might include topics such as, “Fitness”, “Exercise”, “Weightlifting”, “Boxing” etc.
- Pain Points: This refers to unsolved problems that your audience may face. Whether it’s the lack of a product they need or poor customer service, these are issues that you should aim to resolve.
- Preferred Social Media Platforms: Out of all the social media platforms available, where does your audience reside? It can be more than one platform so look into the statistics and demographics of each platform and determine what platforms would work best and what for.
- Name: Give your persona a name that humanises them and encapsulates their character. For example, if your business is a gym or related to the fitness industry, you could consider calling your personas, “Muscle Mike” or “Protein Patricia”.
3.3 Market Research and Analysis
When creating a social media strategy, you need to understand the market landscape for your industry to analyse how you fare against your competitors. There are various methods to review the market landscape but we will discuss two different methods: Competitive benchmarking and conducting a SWOT Analysis.
Competitive Benchmarking
Competitive benchmarking, in this context, is a relatively simple process where you collate your top competitors and measure their social media presence against your business, using a set collection of metrics.
In addition to comparing metrics, you would also need to analyse their content as well. Review their online behaviour and how they engage with their audience; is that something you can apply to your own social media platforms?
As mentioned earlier, tracking your competitors is an entirely necessary process to undertake, as it provides insights into what your audience would appreciate and what works in appealing to them. Competitive benchmarking gives you definitive data to refer to when discerning how you fare against your competitors and suggestions for improvement in your social media strategy.
Map this analysis out into a detailed reporting plan, so that these figures and information can be compared and referred to easily. We’ve crafted an example to show what a competitive benchmarking report might look like and to provide a helpful reference.
SWOT Analysis
A SWOT analysis is a commonly-used framework that evaluates a company’s competitive position and to aid strategic planning. The framework takes both internal, within the company, and external, within the surrounding landscape, factors into account.
In creating a social media strategy, it’s important to understand where your business may be lacking or where they might shine the best. Alongside this, it’s also important to realise what possible potential your business might have.
A SWOT analysis looks at four different aspects of a company: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.
When you analyse these four aspects in both your and any competitor’s businesses, you gain a deeper understanding of your position in the market. Using this information, you can navigate through and adjust your strategy in an efficient manner. You can effectively learn how to amplify your strengths, reduce weaknesses, leverage on opportunities, and eliminate threats.
The table below is an example of a thorough SWOT analysis, conducted for Equinet Academy.
| Strengths | Weaknesses | Opportunities | Threats |
| Regularly churning out educational blog articles and content | Low number of social media followers | Get more customer reviews posted on social media channels and websites | Many different types of institutions offering similar courses |
| High ranking for some digital marketing keywords | Not many video content | Create more engaging content on social media | High search volume for certain keywords like social media marketing |
| Most of the existing reviews from customers are good | Not much branding content to build trust | Focus on Linkedin as a channel to build community and establish the brand authority | Competitors mostly have a wider range of course types offered |
| Trainers that are seasoned and experts in their industry | Competitors with large number of trainers have more credible articles/content to put out | Feature our trainers more in the spotlight to make courses more credible/ personable | Future subsidies will be reduced for SMEs and mid-career individuals |
| Fees are subsidised by SSG for certain groups | Competitors with larger resources have events/webinars regularly | Engage in partnerships to do events/webinars for branding purposes | |
| Strong USPs that we can keep pushing (for further personalization and benefits to students) |
3.3 Action Plan
Using the information you have amassed through your market research and competitive benchmarking, the next step is to create an action plan that is both achievable and effective.
An action plan is a step-by-step plan that details how you will achieve your SMART goals. Your SMART goals describe what you want to achieve while an action plan describes how you will go about achieving these goals.
In an action plan, you need to assign your evaluations, AKA drivers, from your SWOT analysis to actionable tasks that you can undertake in order to fulfill your goals.
| O: Get more customer reviews
T: Competitors have wider range of courses T: Future subsidies will be reduced W: Not much branding W: Competitors have credibility just by name S: Trainers are seasoned |
Build Brand Trust |
| S: Regularly churning out content
W: Not many video content for education S: High ranking for keywords S: Trainers are seasoned |
Create Educational Content |
| S: Trainers are seasoned
W: Competitors have larger resources T: Many different types of institutions offer same courses O: Strong USPs |
Product USPs |
| S: Most reviews are good
O: Create engaging content on social media O: Create group to build relationships and form a community O: Engage in partnerships to do events/webinars |
Community / Company |
| S: Most reviews are good
O: Create engaging content on social media O: Create group to build relationships and form a community W; Low followers S: Fees are subsidised by SSG for younger age groups |
Engagement |
However, to create an effective action plan, you need to first understand content pillars.
Content Pillars
Content pillars are the foundation of what content you will create and publish on your social media channels. It provides a framework to follow throughout the activation of your social media strategy.
Content pillars are essential in creating a cohesive brand image and style, increasing engagement, and authority in your industry. Your content pillars also ensure that you are accurately addressing all stages of the social media marketing funnel.
Basically, your content pillars will contain specific topics or subjects, related to your business, that you will discuss and create content around on social media. Establish a set of topics and content types that your audience is interested in and make that the foundation of your content creation.
Using your content pillars, you can create an action plan that addresses the drivers from your SWOT analysis, your goals, as well as the stages of the social media marketing funnel.
3.4 Schedule
In all social media strategies, you need to establish a comprehensive and consistent schedule. A posting schedule ensures regularity, so as to avoid sparse or overwhelming content, and also encourages familiarity with followers.
Considering how modern users crave content, it is important to refrain from taking long breaks from posting as users could be more likely to grow disinterested. On the other hand, posting too frequently could cause a content fatigue in followers, leading to a possible disdain for your brand.
Therefore, it is best to find the perfect balance in a publishing schedule for a range of content types.
Additionally, there could be specific days or times where followers are most active and more likely to interact and engage with your posts. While this may require more digging into your page’s analytics, knowing this information would pay off in the long run.
To start with, in accordance with your content pillars, examine the time needed to create each content type and take that information into account when creating a schedule. This is an important step as miscalculating the time needed for creation could throw your social media plan off of schedule.
Next, you need to determine which days you will post content and what content will be posted that day. This could be based on a variety of factors such as convenience for yourself, proven higher engagement rates, or simply on a every other day or twice weekly basis.
While this may appear hard to keep track of, an easy tool to organise your schedule would be with the use of a social media content calendar. In a social media calendar, you chart out what piece of content would be posted when as a way to keep organised as well as to have something to refer to.
If you would like a more in-depth look into content calendars, we recommend reading our Guide to Creating a Content Calendar. Alongside this, we also have a Social Media Content Calendar Template for you to apply to your own social media efforts.
3.5 Evaluate and Optimise
Once you have implemented a social media strategy, evaluation is the next step in ensuring its running smoothly. Try to conduct an evaluation regularly, such as every quarter year, to analyse what seems to be working and where you might be lacking.
When you track your content and compare it to your goals, you can gauge whether you are staying on target. While it is expected that your goals may require some time to be achieved, your rate of growth can determine whether your strategy is working.
If you have yet to see any distinguishable growth within each quarter, you can then take action to optimise your content. Using analytics, you can determine what type of content has been working best for you and utilise it further in your strategy for example.
In any social media strategy, consistently evaluating and taking action allows you to be optimised in your content, eventually leading to reaching your goals.
3.6 Social Listening
Once your strategy has been implemented and is running smoothly, it is important to keep an eye out for all mentions of your brand, competitors, and industry, on social media. As previously discussed, social listening is the act of tracking these mentions on social media and proceeding to take action on what users are saying.
Social listening is a task that you should be carrying out regularly throughout your social media strategy; always keep yourself updated and in the loop. With social listening, you can directly find out how your audience thinks and feels towards your brand which is known as sentiments.
Knowing how your customers feel about your brand can help you improve your customer experience, benchmark against competitors, as well as gauge the success of your strategy. If users are speaking of you with positive connotations, you know where you’re leading and if the mentions are negative, you know which areas you lack.
When you understand the sentiment surrounding your brand on social media, you can leverage where you are currently succeeding while properly addressing and taking action against any shortcomings.
3.7 Community Management Guidelines
As mentioned earlier, social media community management is the act of growing and nurturing an online community of your fans and followers. When carrying out community management, which all brands should strive to do, it is important to form a set of guidelines.
Having community management guidelines is essential, especially when working with a team or external managers, as they set a definitive standard for everyone to follow. These guidelines should cover the do’s and don’ts of engagement with your audience; the tone, language, and style used when interacting with members of your community.
Your community represents your brand and therefore, should emulate the same values your brand holds. Setting guidelines is not a simple task, especially as it can differ on each platform, but think about different situations in which you would need to de-escalate a negative situation or how to amplify a positive one.
Effective guidelines should cover how to engage in interactions both positive, a good review for example, and negative, a concern or criticism. Both experiences should be treated with the same level of importance — doing so helps to solidify your reputation as a company that is authentic, genuine, and one that treats all customers with respect.
For example, here’s an example of what one section of a community guidelines might look like for Equinet Academy, regarding brand mentions on social media.
| Brand Mention | Response SOP |
| Positive |
|
| Negative |
|
As you can see, these guidelines do not describe a standard copy-and-paste reply; it is, instead, a general guide on how to tackle instances such as these.
In this example, both responses show respect to users, whether their experience is positive or negative. Acknowledging their thoughts and opinions, addressing the content, and opening the door to further communication are all elements that should be included in community management guidelines.
When writing your own, be sure to include response guidelines that are attentive and emotive, to properly address their comments. Doing so can help you avoid any possible backlash, escalation, or controversy.
3.8 Social Media Community Management Checklist
On a daily basis, it may be difficult to juggle all the aspects of social media community management. There’s responding to queries, engaging with followers, addressing concerns or criticisms and so much more.
To stay on top of your social media platforms, it is important to create a checklist for all the tasks needed to be completed. Having a checklist allows you to stay organised and ensure that every necessity has been completed, keeping you up-to-date with your social media presence.
Create a list of necessary tasks on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis for you to follow and complete since different tasks would require action at different frequencies. For example, a task such as “Replying to Direct Messages”, would be on a daily basis as it’s necessary to be prompt in your replies. Leaving your followers waiting can cause impatience and distrust on their end, making you appear uncaring.
Compile a list of necessary tasks in your social media community, from something as simple as “Like and reply to all comments” to tasks that require more finesse like “Connect with Influencers for Partnership Opportunities”. Your tasks are entirely dependent on your social media strategy but we have a foundational template available for you to utilise in our Social Media Strategy Template here.
4. Conclusion
In conclusion, social media is an excellent asset to your digital marketing efforts and can expose your business to a wide, neverending audience. When creating a social media strategy there are a few things you should always include.
- Set SMART goals: Follow these five elements when crafting goals for your social media marketing.
Specific – Ensure your goals are not vague and are specific in what you want to achieve.
Measurable – Your goals have to have measurable figures that you can compare your progress too
Attainable – Ensure your goals are reasonable and achievable for your business.
Relevant – Your goals should be relevant to your overall business and marketing objectives.
Time-Bound – Set a deadline for yourself to achieve these goals.
2. Understand your audience: Create a customer persona, a fictionalised character that embodies the traits of your ideal target audience. Include the following details when creating a customer persona.
Name – Give your character a name to humanise them.
Age – What is the age group of your target audience?
Gender – Are your products or services geared more towards women or men?
Location – Where is your audience located?
Areas of Interest – What are the topics or hobbies that your target audience would be interested in?
Pain Points – What are the issues and problems that your target audience may face that has yet to be solved by your competitors?
Preferred Social Media Platforms – Which social media platforms do your target audience frequent the most?
3. Market Research and Competitive Analysis: Before creating a social media strategy, conduct research to determine where you rank within your industry.
Competitive Analysis – Determine who your biggest competitors are and evaluate their social media presence. By analysing their content as well as their successes, you can then compare yourself to them and fill any gaps they might have or leverage on the content types that work well for them. Choose 3–5 competitors and analyse their social media presence.
Market Research – Conduct a SWOT analysis of your company to understand what your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats might be. Your strengths would refer to areas within your company that you excel in such as possessing numerous positive reviews. Whereas, your weaknesses would determine your shortcomings. Opportunities are actionable tasks that you can fulfill to improve your social media presence while Threats are factors that could pose unfortunate consequences for your brand.
4. Action Plan – Your action plan is a guide to how you will achieve your aims. Within your action plan, you will need to establish content pillars which are essentially a group of relevant topics that you will craft content around. Your content pillars also need to be measured against the social media marketing funnel as these content pieces will serve a different section of the funnel.
5. Schedule – Determine when and where your content will be posted on social media. You can do so by creating a social media calendar where you map out and plan ahead your posting schedule. You can find our Social Media Calendar Template here.
6. Evaluate – In order to discern whether your social media strategy is functioning as expected, you will need to conduct a regular evaluation. Use your page analytics to compare your growth against your goals. From there, you can make adjustments to your strategy and optimise your social media accounts.
7. Social Listening – Social listening requires you to keep track of any and all mentions of your brand on social media and subsequently take action on the conversation surrounding your brand. When mentions are positive, you can use this good publicity to your advantage and when mentions are negative, you can gain control of the narrative and address the problem at hand.
8. Community Management Guidelines – When creating and fostering an online community of your fans and followers, you need to create guidelines on how best to handle interactions. Especially when working within a team, you need a definitive standard for everyone to adhere to. Ensure your guidelines include how to interact with followers, handle positive and negative situations, and treat followers with the utmost respect.
9. Social Media Community Management Checklist – Create a daily, weekly, and monthly checklist of social media tasks that need to be actioned. Doing so helps you stay organised and on track while also ensuring your audience’s needs are being met. Determine which tasks need to be done on a daily basis such as “Replying to Direct Messages”, tasks for a weekly basis such as “Check the News for Trendjacking Opportunities” and tasks to be done on a monthly basis like, “Connect with Influencers for Partnerships”.