Social media strategy and planning essentials series
This is part 7 of my Smart Insights 12 part social media series. In the last part we looked at aligning social media with other marketing channels; in this blog, I discuss what resources you need to manage your social media marketing and how you scale a social team sensibly.
To frame the conversation, you need to find answers to the following questions:
How many people do you need and in which roles?
What business processes are required?
What KPIs should you use and what resources do you need to measure them?
What tech and tools are required for your social media plan?
How do these resource demands change in the next few years?
Approaches to resourcing
There are two main ways to plan your resourcing:
Bottom up
You’re governed by the resource currently at your disposal, so you shape your scope of work around this. For example,…
Social media strategy and planning essentials series
This is part 6 of my Smart Insights 12 part social media series. In the last part we looked at the role of content in social media; in this blog, I discuss how social needs to work as part of your overall marketing plan, not in isolation.
The role of a marketing calendar
Most organisations have a marketing calendar that outlines the key campaigns for the year, typically broken down into monthly cycles. As with the content calendar, I discussed in the previous article, this helps define the big campaigns, the key messages, promotions, CTAs and the channels through which they will be delivered.
Social media needs to align with this calendar. Typically the most successful campaigns are executed across multiple channels simultaneously, promoting the same core message, albeit with a slightly different execution in each channel e.g. paid search campaigns typically use product and offer…
Social media strategy and planning essentials series
This is part 5 of my Smart Insights 12 part social media series. In the last part, we looked at the role of organic vs paid social media and touched on the importance of content. In this blog, I discuss a sensible way to approach content planning for your social media channels.
Social media networks support multiple content formats and there has been rapid growth in the use of interactive formats, for example, carousel ads on Facebook. This flexibility of format (text, image, multi-image, video, carousel etc.) gives marketers the ability to experiment with different types of content to gauge how best to attract and engage social users.
If people are the heartbeat of social media, content is the blood. It’s your content that people see and respond to, and that communicates your values and messages.
But what content works? How do you plan what to…
Social media strategy and planning essentials
It’s important to know what other organisations in your market are doing on social media, to give you context for the current role social plays in customer communication. The aim of competitor analysis is to learn from the state of play and identify strategic opportunities.
Please note that I also advocate researching the wider market to learn what works from brands that have a respected social presence. They may not be directly relevant to you in terms of content or product, but the techniques and social platform tools they use to engage customers should provide useful insight.
This article looks at the types of competitor analysis you can and should be doing to help inform your social media strategy.
1. Audit scope of competitor activity
Your goal is to build a clear picture of how other organisations are currently using social media. This needs someone to spend time on…
Creating your social media strategy and tactical plan
Noun: Strategy / A plan of action designed to achieve a long-term or overall aim.
First, you need to understand what a strategy is, and isn’t it. A strategy should define the main aim of your social media presence and set the parameters for what it will deliver and how it will be delivered. It will be supported by a tactical plan that defines how the strategy will be delivered, including the channels, resource and budgets to achieve it.
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Tip – ensure your strategy is no more than 3-4 pages long. A strategy has to be concise and provide the governing principles that guide the plan.
1…
Real world examples of a range of platforms that help land & expand
‘Social’ is an absolute phenomenon. Apparently, if Facebook was a nation, it would have more people than China. Serious scale to say the least.
In today’s world, it’s not whether your ideal audiences are on social media, but a question of where they are.
When we see life through an account-based marketing (ABM) lens, we want to work with as many of our target accounts as possible. That’s what it’s all about. So if organisations you want to onboard are there - you need to be there. If you don’t grab the opportunity, you can bet your bottom dollar your competition will - so get to it!
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Hello account-based social
Account-based social can be defined…
In new research by GetSocial, we look at new methods of sharing, the rise of Dark Social as a traffic source, the decay of the Facebook Feed and a surprising comparison of both (spoiler: dark social wins)
There are now 1.2 billion pages indexed on Google mentioning Dark Social. Definitions vary but they don’t escape much of what Alexis Madrigal wrote in 2012:
“it shows up variously in programs as "direct" or typed/bookmarked" traffic (...) but that's not actually what's happening a lot of the time. Most of the time, someone g-chatted someone a link, or it came in on a big email distribution list, or your dad sent it to you.“
I call mainstream on the topic. Now, more than ever, marketers and audience developers must look at Dark Social. Not as a myth, something that may be happening,…
Developing a Joined Up Approach to your Social Media and Customer Communications
In this post I show how we use different tools and plugins for our different social platforms to let software services take some of the key pounding out of online publishing.
Here is my summary of our process and the tools we use. We're always interested to learn about new tools or other approaches, so let us know if you have other suggestions.
The diagram shows the approach we use on Smart Insights to support content sharing across the main social networks while minimising the resource needed. We aim to publish two to three posts daily as a target, balancing advice and updates on major developments in digital marketing. These are posted to our blog and then we use tagging of topics in different categories to surface the advice in…
It’s official - too much time spent on social media is bad for your mental health
Following a blog post in December 2017, in which Facebook acknowledged spending too much time on the platform could lead to negative effects on health, it has now gone one step further to demonstrate its commitment to halt the spread of neurotic D-FOMO (Digital Fear of Missing Out).
In conjunction with mental health experts and organizations, Facebook and Instagram have introduced tools that restrict the amount of time people spend on apps. Users can monitor just how long they've spent scrolling and swiping away the hours, set a reminder for when they've reached their allocated time, and limit notifications.
The tools can be accessed via the settings page on either app by tapping "Your Activity" on Instagram or "Your Time on Facebook" on Facebook.
However, some say the gesture simply doesn't go far enough.
"It’s not going to really…
How are promoted posts used on LinkedIn?
If you have responsibility for promoting your company on LinkedIn, you may be wondering where your priorities lie. Your personal profile lets you share what your company does to your first-degree connections, but what about everyone else? How do you spread the word to a wider audience? It may be tempting to invest time in your LinkedIn company page whose updates can be followed by anyone regardless of their connection to you.
In my newest Quick Win, I show you how to get the most out of your LinkedIn profile and become a thought leader in your industry.
Unfortunately, unless you’re willing to invest a significant amount of money in sponsored ads, your LinkedIn company page will be pretty much invisible to your target audience. To see what I mean, go into your LinkedIn feed and see where the status updates are coming from. What you’ll…
