Social media marketing changes every single year, and the start of the year is the best time to review your social media strategy, in order to be ready for the year ahead. Planning a social media strategy should be done at the start of the year in order to plan make the necessary adjustments. The big idea here is to make sure that every single social media platform will be utilized effectively.
If your social media marketing strategies for 2017 didn’t produce satisfactory results, this is the best opportunity to analyze your previous marketing plan in order to find out where you went wrong and make the necessary adjustments in order to have better results this year.
Even if your previous year’s marketing strategy produced satisfactory results, you should never settle and always strive for more success, by exploring new ideas in order to generate better results this year.
You will need to review your social media marketing strategy for the year ahead, so here is a checklist to help you stay on the right track and keep up with the latest trends.
1. Analyze Your Audience
Being able to reach your target audience is crucial to your success, that’s why you need to take a close and hard look at audience feedback and insight on each of the platforms that you utilize in order to have a better grasp of their thoughts, and understand if you need to extend or maybe narrow down your reach, which can produce better results.
2. Analyze the Platforms You Are Utilizing
By analyzing the data that you have gathered in the past year, you will be able to assess the effectiveness of each platform in order to achieve your goals. Sometimes it may be a better idea to focus your attention to only certain platforms that are producing more success. It would be a waste of time to focus on every social network if it isn’t working out for you, so you should take time to assess if you should dial down your focus on certain platforms that aren’t producing satisfactory results or maybe even stop using them altogether so you can focus on more successful platforms.
3. Measure your existing ROI (Return of Investment)
You should carefully analyze the previous year’s data, and find out your social media ROI, in order to find out if you are producing satisfactory results. You should then analyze your current social media ROI, and then set your goal and expectations for the year ahead.
4. Review KPIs
For those of you that don’t know what is a KPI, it stands for Key Performance Indicator, which is a measurable value that shows how effectively a company is hitting their key business goals and objectives. Now that it’s a new year, is the time for you to update your KPIs to fit your objectives for the year ahead, and time to decide if you will be tweaking your social media marketing strategy. Use last year’s data and results as a benchmark, and then set the bar high but still remain realistic. You should always aim higher!
5. Organize your new social calendar
The start of the New Year is the time for you to update your social media calendar in order to plan ahead and set upcoming campaigns. This will give you a time frame for everyone to follow in order to be more organized to help you achieve your objectives.
6. Review the frequency of your social posting
Are you creating enough original content or are you creating too much? Sometimes creating too much content can be a bad thing, since it may cause the level of quality of the content to decrease. You should determine if you should focus more on quality rather than quantity. Each social media platform will require different levels of content. You should also find out if the content that you are posting is hitting your desired level of engagement, and if not, then you should try reducing the frequency of your posts, which may affect how many people interact to each of the posts you make.
7. Mix up your content
Are you posting a wide selection of content? Posting only a certain type of content can be dull and stale, so you should think about mixing up your content type to take advantage of new social media trends, which can help you give a more impactful social media presence for the year ahead. Think about investing in content such as video or GIFs for your brand marketing strategy, since visual content have a higher impact than just plain old text. You can also convert your existing content to a different format which won’t lead to a lot of additional work.
8. Align social media with your website.
It is a good idea to use social media to funnel people into your own website. There are several ways to do this such as paid social media or organically. Just remember that the user’s experience is just as important as creating the right content and campaign message. That’s why if you want to navigate people from social media to your landing pages, then you should make it as easy as possible for them.
9. Optimize your social content for SEO
Social media isn’t exactly an official ranking factor SEO, but it can still affect it, and contribute to your online presence. Using social media can help build a stronger social presence, that’s why you should aim for higher user engagement by producing high quality original content.