How to implement your content strategy in social media

Making social media happen for your business

General implementation background activities

• Channels / platforms 
  You’ve worked out your strategic plan, so now’s the time to choose your channel and prepare each post appropriately for the channel selected – LinkedIn, Facebook, twitter etc. To do this, consider what your target is expecting from you by putting yourself in their shoes. 
• Content generation / optimisation
  Choose your content type from the large range available (post, article, blog, picture, infographic, video, webinar, queries, etc) and be clear on what you want readers to do in response – make sure they know it too! 
• Publishing and promotion
  Be mindful of your strategic goals; why are you doing this? Will it help you achieve a positive outcome? And be open-minded and ambitious – some campaigns might require paid promotions for that extra ‘boost’. 
• Engagement
  Ensure you are clear on how will you develop engagement with your audience after you publish. Ask yourself, what will you do to offer a better experience to your target audience, and what will they expect from your response? 

And don’t forget, social media is about sociology and psychology more than technology! 

How to prepare your channels

• Refer to your strategy and planning regarding the best channels to use 
  Also, determine the best time of the week and day to post to these channels – it can make all the difference! 
• Review your primary audience as it now stands; are they warmed up?
  Consider an approach for preparing this audience for any upcoming campaign by posting aspects of your campaign to get them into the correct mindset – you can lose your audience by apparently going off at a tangent, if it’s something they’re not expecting. 
• Make sure your social channels are properly set up
  This is good housekeeping – hygiene factors which are boring but important: complete all the required profile and company information fields, ensure all information that a visitor might need is populated and correct, review the use of your branding and standardise its use where possible, and check your photos, refreshing them or reviewing their quality.   
• Determine what content types will work best for each channel
  Consider your audience in this, their interests, popular groups and key engagements etc 

Developing your content

Always consider how to be effective – if you can’t make it work, drop it and move on to something else. 

So consider: 

• Content types – choose what will benefit your customer most, not just benefit you and make you feel good. 
• Collaborations – use colleagues and contributors to develop helpful and beneficial content – don’t try to do it all yourself. 
• Batch content creation – that way you’ll create your content efficiently, rather than be constantly running to catch up. For example, if you’re shooting a video, why not produce two or three at the same time? It’ll be worth it for the cost savings alone! 
• Quality over quantity  – think how you can benefit your audience, not just how to fill their feed. It’s just too easy to lose their interest, and if you lose it once, you might never get it back. 
• Learn from others – research your competitors and brands from other industries to find what works best for them, then copy it. What have you got to lose? 

Publishing and promotion

So now that it’s finally time to make it happen, here’s what you should be doing: 

• Stick to your plan – that’s what you went to the trouble of writing it for, isn’t it? 
• Understand the purpose of the post – it could be engagement, selling a product, brand awareness or any one of many reasons; focus on it, and don’t lose sight of it. 
• Decide when to publish your content to get the best results – make sure you capture your audience’s attention at the right time of day, the month, the market cycle, the political environment etc – you may need to be a little flexible here! 
• Use a publishing and management tool – to avoid boring and time consuming duplicate publishing tasks and to ensure you avoid the addictive qualities of social media! 
• Promotion – you need to consider if your post will benefit you through further exposure – or should you publish something new? Don’t forget ‘remarketing’ – research shows how effective it is,  serving up content to your engaged audience again and again. 

Our top 10 tips for engagement

Follow these and you won’t go wrong! 

1. Create original and relevant content – ie make sure your posts are interesting! 
2. Understand the platform’s algorithm – you’ve got to ensure you understand how the channel’s algorithms work in order to be able to make the best of it. 
3. Prioritise visuals over text – infographics, videos, images, gifs etc all gather much more attention than plain text. 
4. Create socially engaging posts – Why not run a Q&A session? Or a live video, webinars, guides, screenings, live talks, polls, surveys, giveaways, takeovers, interviews – the list goes on… 
5. Ask questions – if you ask, someone will answer: bingo! 
6. Team up with other brands for mutual benefit – eg an engineering company with its main customer, so that you can share contacts and their interests. 
7. Reply to comments – always answer comments in times when the rest of your audience 
   will see you. It’s tempting to respond immediately to a comment, however you’d be better to wait until you know there is an audience following you; ie don’t reply at 11 at night, wait until the following morning, otherwise your response will be buried low down on your followers feeds. 
8. Promote conversation – reply to comments with ‘open’ questions and engaging responses. 
9. Create personable and real content – why not go behind the scenes, offer up case studies, personal stories, share achievements and challenges? After all, it’s ‘social’ media, so share relatable real-world experiences. 
10.  Repeat what works – when you find a winning formula, stick with it until it starts fading. 

What next?

1. Identify a successful conversion and decide whether the lead meets your criteria. 
2. Manage audience expectations and intentions, defining your lead profiles as tightly as possible; question how well your lead segmentation works, as better lead profiling will lead to better conversion rates. 
3. Work out what you will say to your leads and what is the next step in your relationship. Allocate responsibility for following up, and ensure they know what to say and how to do it best. 
4. Personalise your response where possible – always address the individual, if you can, rather than just giving a generic response. 

I hope you’ve found this helpful. If you want to discuss any of this info, or your own social media implementation, do please contact me on mark@mar-com.net, or on 07860 799426. 

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