Hello, hello, and welcome back to
the freelance Friday podcast today. I want to talk about how to build a
social media strategy in 2024, because some things have definitely changed. In fact, that's kind of the
point they change every single year, different platforms, pop up
different platforms, gain popularity. Things go out of business or out of style. And it's important that we make
sure that we are updating our social media strategies at least every
year, whether it's for a client or for your own small business. So the first thing that you want to keep
in mind when you are putting together a social media strategy is first off,
what is our goal with social media? And again, you want to make sure
that you are updating this year over year, a very new business might have
the primary goal of just gaining a following building awareness because
they're new in the market, right? They might not be focused at
this point on a huge amount of conversions or anything like that. They just might be wanting
people to know who they are. So in those cases, you're going
to be looking at awareness focused metrics like reach, meaning how many
people actually saw your post, like impressions, how many times were your
posts seen, and that's also going to drive your content strategy as well. So if you are really just focused
on awareness, you're going to be looking for those platforms and those
content types that are super viral or have super viral potential, right? Whereas if you were more Mid funnel,
as we say, you know, the top of the funnel is very awareness focused. The middle of the funnel is more about
engagement, actually getting those people who have followed you or have seen your
content to like you to start to trust you and start to move to the bottom of
the funnel to the point of purchase. So if you're in that middle funnel
stage, you might be focusing on platforms that are more about. Brand affinity and engagement. So something like a YouTube or a
podcast, those types of content allow you to kind of sit with the, the person
who's hosting, get to know your brand a little bit better, build up that trust
before they go ahead and, and bite. So this is really important to
think about because like I said, your goals can change over time. Your client's goals can change over time. You're one, you might be focused
on awareness year two, you might be focused more on engagement year three,
you might be focused on conversion. And of course, you know, you can
move through that funnel faster too. That can all happen within the span of
a year or even, you know, a couple of months, but the actions that you take. The tactics that you recommend
are going to be different depending on where they're at. So it's really important to keep that in
mind and really important to keep in mind your KPIs or key performance indicators. Those were those metrics that I was just
talking about, you know, impressions, reach engagement, because if you are
reporting on the wrong thing to your client, if you're saying, Hey client,
we just gained a bunch of followers, but they're really focused on conversions. Or if you say, Hey, we got a bunch of
engagements, but they're really focused on, you know, awareness and how many
people saw their post, you might be speaking the wrong language to them. And it can be a struggle
to retain your clients. And it can be a struggle for
you to, to know how well you're. Um, and then you're going to want to make
sure that you're actually performing. Now, the next thing to think
about is who you're talking to. And obviously you should probably
have this in mind when you're thinking about your goal as well. But step two, I really want you to paint
a detailed picture of who you are trying to reach with your social media content. Yes, most clients, most businesses
are not going to be mad at anybody seeing their posts. However, there are absolutely more likely
customers or the most likely customers. That we can all kind of points you
and knowing your target audience drives so much of this strategy. If I'm speaking to men in their
sixties, I'm going to be on a different platform than if I'm speaking to young
women, you know, ages 20 and under. Right. And I know those are two pretty extreme. Differences, stark differences,
but there can even be subtleties. And are you trying to reach women in
their thirties who are stay at home moms or women in their thirties who
are mid career professionals, right? Those are two different platforms. Those are two different maybe looks and
feels and sounds of your copy of your. Um, and if you're looking for a way to
get more content, you want to look at your images of your content types, right? Not always, there can absolutely be
overlap in those things, but you want to keep those things in mind before you
make any serious decisions about which platforms you're going to be on, what
style you're going to post in, and so on. I get this question a lot. What if my client doesn't
know who they want to reach? And first off, I consider this a
little bit of a, I would say maybe like a pink flag or an orange flag. If your client comes to you and
says, Hey, run my social media, but I have no idea who I want to
reach, or I want to reach everybody. That isn't a great sign
for me necessarily, because any business owner who. Really is about their business
for lack of better words. They will be able to explain this to you. And this is something you can take for
your own business to like, get in the habit of, of talking about your ideal
customer, really knowing who they are. You'll be better for it. You'll be more clear when talking
to others who want to refer you to people or, you know. So, yeah, I take it as a bit of a,
you know, like I said, an orange flag. It doesn't mean that you definitely
shouldn't work with that client. Definitely in startup phase,
early days, they might just be a little all over the place and
still be figuring these things out. I think there are exercises you can do
with them to help them figure it out. We go through a whole buyer
persona lesson in the social media management accelerator. There's some templates that you
can use with your clients to kind of walk them through that process. So that's really helpful, but it's
definitely a conversation that you should be having before you sign a contract
with a client, it should come as no surprise to them or to you that you're
going to need that information to make. Sound social media strategy
decisions for them. And by the way, if you are interested
in joining the next round of the accelerator, I will leave a link
for you down in the show notes where you can join the waitlist. You'll be the first to know when
we open doors for the next round, and that'll get you the absolute
best deal on enrollment fees. As well as some fun bonuses. So be sure to check that out. The accelerator is my immersive
program for social media managers or aspiring social media managers. We go through all of this strategy
stuff, step by step together in a cohort or group environment. It's not just any other course where you
get the material and you walk away with it and are left to your own devices. I am involved. I am there as your coach and you get
to communicate with your peers as well. So it's a good time. And we've been able to help hundreds
getting really close actually to the thousand student Mark, um, of students,
you know, improve their careers, launch their social media management careers. And. Move up to the next level. All right the third step in this
once you know who you're talking to you Know what you want to do. The third step is you want to decide
which platforms you are going to focus on now There are a million platforms out
there It feels like and it can be really challenging to decide which ones you're
gonna be on Or decide how much, you know, are, are you going to be on all of them? It can be very tempting to do that. My recommendation is to choose
at least one longer form or more SEO friendly platform. I'm talking a YouTube. I'm talking Pinterest, which is
a little bit of a, you know, it's not really long form, but it's
definitely very search heavy. Even a podcast or a blog, I know there's
not really social media, but they're going to help you create social media content. So choose one of those platforms if you
can, and then choose one shorter form, more trendy, more potentially viral. Platform like a tech talk, like
Instagram reels, like YouTube shorts. If you're doing long for
YouTube, you should probably be doing YouTube shorts as well. So start there with two
platforms to really focus on. And ideally they're going
to work well together. So for my example, I do YouTube,
that's my primary platform. And then I repurposed to all
of those other platforms. I really started by just
repurposing to tech talk. And then once I realized, okay. I'm learning kind of how to edit
for short form platforms and what's really working over there. Then I started repurposing onto
Instagram reels and, you know, LinkedIn and other things like that. So that's my best tip. Don't overwhelm yourself, especially
if you're a one person team. If you're either running social
media for your own business. or, you know, your solopreneur, solo
freelancer doing social media for a brand don't overwhelm yourself unless
you are already quite experienced. Now, with that said, how,
how did I decide on YouTube? Right. How might you decide between Pinterest
and LinkedIn or TikTok and YouTube shorts? Well, what I really recommend
doing is looking at the data. If you have been around for a
while, you know, that Metro Cool is a sponsor of this podcast. It is my favorite social media tool. They have scheduling, they have analytics. They have so much. You can always use my code Latasha at the
link down in the description to get 30 days free on any of their premium plans. But I've actually got something
a little bit more exciting even to talk to you about today. They're 2023 social media networks study. It is here and it is glorious. They analyzed over 20 million
social media posts from nine different social media platforms. It's their biggest study yet, and
it's packed with valuable insights and trend predictions for 2024. You can get answers to questions like how
has it evolved social media since 2023? What are the top performing
content formats these days? Which platforms and strategies
are working best for brands and businesses and so much more. So again, you can check that
out down in the show notes. I'll leave a direct link to that study. It's totally free to check out. There is so much good data in there. And if you want to try out
Metro cool, use code Latasha. 30 days free on any of
their premium plans. I'll leave that link down below as well. So yeah, look at the data, look
at reports like this one from Metricool, but also look at your
own data or your client's own data. So go through their past performance and. Take a look and really break things down. For me, this was not just looking
at my on platform, social media data, which can be helpful. You know, if you go into Instagram
insights, for example, or Facebook insights, or if you hook your social
media up to a tool like metrical, you can get some reports that you can scan
through, but I like to even take it a step further than that and look at my Google. Analytics. So if you can get access to your
clients, Google analytics, or you can install it on your own website
and see which social media platforms are referring the most traffic. To the website that is the end goal,
if that is indeed your end goal. So example, if you are doing social media
for an e commerce brand, well, you don't really need to care all of that much about
how many, you know, impressions or how many engagements are getting on Instagram. You want to know how many add to
carts you're getting, or at least how many landing page visits are
getting over on your website, right? So Google analytics will enable you
to be able to see which platforms are, are indeed referring traffic your way. And that'll help you decide where to
pull the lever, where to, you know, invest more time in and so on, and
where not to invest a ton of time. When I look at my Google analytics
report for my course website, at least. I see that YouTube is really
doing double duty for me. It is referring almost all of
my traffic, that and Google. So that's why I'm still doing YouTube. That is why I invest so much time and
energy into YouTube because it, it works for me in terms of referring traffic. Meanwhile, Instagram does
almost nothing for me. And that doesn't mean that
Instagram isn't valuable. Again, we got to go back to
our goals here and think. What do we really want to
do with these platforms? And for me, Instagram is a
customer service channel. It's a communication channel. It's a branding channel for me, whereas
YouTube is more about conversions and that kind of mid to down funnel type
of content, there is a ton of data in that metrical study, but some of the. Um, kind of insights that I found the
most interesting and most relevant to this conversation when we're thinking
about overall strategic planning for next year, number one, that reels are
really essential to growth, either on Facebook and or on Instagram. still are really important
to those strategies. So keep that in mind. If you're planning out social
media content for Instagram or Facebook, you want to make sure
that reels are included in that. Another one that's very interesting
to me is that tick tocks video length is steadily increasing. It seems like tech talk is like. We are ready to, uh, you
know, make advertising money. We're ready to increase
some of that brand affinity. And they are up to an
average of 55 seconds. Now, a lot of us got introduced to
Tik TOK as like a 15 second, sometimes even like seven second video app. Well, they are. Looking to compete, I think with YouTube,
with podcasts, with, with all the things. And the average is up to 55 seconds. YouTube, YouTube uploads are up for
most creators, so we're uploading more often, but engagement is down. So this gave me a little bit of
reassurance that it's not just me, but. Yeah, I still think that
YouTube is incredibly valuable. Maybe we'll have this
conversation at another time. Let me know if you're interested
in it, but yeah, I think it's getting a little bit harder to keep
people's attention on this platform. So that might mean that if you are going
to choose YouTube as a platform that you focus on, that you're also investing in
an editor, that you're also investing in a team who can be on camera and be really
engaging and keep people's attention. You know, Goodbye are the days
of just posting boring corporate webinars on YouTube and really
expecting that to grow your channel to anything significant, right? So this is an investment, both
time, both financial, uh, people investment, all of that, even though
I do think it is incredibly valuable. Twitter or X has had quite, quite a year,
quite, quite a, quite a time lately. Well, it looks like even though there
have been lower posts, the lower post frequency for most brands engagement
is actually up on those posts. So it seems like the people who are
sticking around or like really sticking around, and I think some of, uh, the, you
know, Exodus from the platform, a lot of people, a lot of brands have left Twitter. Over the past year, I think it's made, uh,
Twitter a little bit less overwhelming. So the people that you are
following, you're excited when you see them in their feed. So still could be a very viable strategy. And the last point that I wanted
to share with you is that LinkedIn shares are up significantly this year. I feel like we never talk about LinkedIn,
you know, the proverbial we, as in. Uh, the marketing community, the
social media community, the YouTube community, I feel like LinkedIn is kind
of forgotten about sometimes, but it is an incredibly valuable platform. And people are wanting to
share content over there. So post content for them to share. After you decide on your
platforms, you need to decide what you're actually going to say. How are you actually going to
achieve those goals on those platforms and reach the right people? First, I think we got to
start with messaging, like What is our overall promise? What is our brand promise? What is our offer? What is our unique value proposition? Making sure that you
really figure that out. And again, as a social media
manager, if you're like a freelance social media manager, that's not
necessarily your job to come up with brand boilerplate messaging. But again, just like the audience,
this should be something that you are comfortable communicating about. This should be something that you
are comfortable asking for, sending them through an onboarding form
that asks for this information, having that conversation. If they maybe have a very long, this
is something that I had to do a lot when I worked in corporate is like, we
would have this very long boiler plate kind of Wikipedia style messaging. And I'm like, we got a. Socialize this, we've got to
condense this down for social media. Cause I only have a certain number of
characters to put into my Instagram bio. So while you might not be responsible
for that per se, you are responsible for getting that information and
communicating that information. From there, I like to
create content pillars. So I recommend coming up with two to three
kind of buckets of content or categories of content, whatever you want to call it. And again, go back to your goal. If you want to sell stuff, if you are
doing social for an e commerce company, well, then you want to make sure that
you were showcasing social proof. You can do this through testimonials. You can do this through user
generated content, customer. Driven content, right? That's a great way to kind of
show your product in action, show that people are loving it. You might also create a pillar that's
about ingredients or methodology. If it is not a physical product,
maybe if it's like a education product or something like that, it
might be, Hey, here's what we teach. Here's what's included kind of a
look under the hood, if you will, because people want to sort of try
before they buy, they want to know what's inside before they buy, so
that might be a pillar for you. You might leave a pillar on the calendar
for promotions or just kind of things that are going on in the business. Maybe there's a special event. If you run social media for a coffee
shop, there's an arts event, a local community event that you want to
include in that pillar, or maybe you are doing BOGO lattes one day. So making sure that you have
space for that and that you're just planning and leaving room in
your calendar and planning ahead. So if your clients so that you can
communicate about those promotions or those events or that UGC or
whatever you choose as a pillar. If your goal is more about just
growing followers, building up that awareness, that top of the funnel
type content, well, you really want to lean heavy on the value, right? Education. If you have an online business, you
want to make sure that you are really. Telling, showing, you know,
explaining, kind of doing that, what, why type content. So maybe I am a, I teach a course on
gardening, let's just say, uh, I'm going to be talking about why you need a garden. What a garden is, what you can grow in
a garden, what some of the possibilities are, you know, what some of the recipes
are that I've grown from my garden. And the idea is that that educational
content, that top of the funnel content will gain a following,
help you gain a following. And then you can do some of that, how
type of content, that next level content. And in your paid materials in
your paid courses, or even just in future pieces of content that
people choose to continue to watch. So know where you're at in the funnel,
know what the goal is, know who you're talking to, and know what you want to say. And just break that up into
content pillars and then just cycle through that content. You know, making sure that. You're not doing all educational
content for an entire month or all UGC content for an entire month. You're able to look at those other
pillars that you've identified for yourself and can cycle between those
just to keep content fresh and to make sure that you are kind of hitting all
of your, all of your goals, if you will. After you've done all that, it's
really about creating content or doing whatever you need to get content. There's. There's content creation, there's
content curation, and technically speaking, content creation is not
really a social media manager's job. If you're doing this, if you're watching
this for your own business, then yeah, like you got to get scrappy more than
likely, unless you have a huge budget and can hire out content creation. But if you're a social media manager or
freelance social media manager, or even an in house social media manager, you
know, depending on your job description. Creation might not
technically be in your role. However, I do think it is important
that we know enough to be dangerous. As I like to say that we know how to
use Canva, that we know how to browse stock image sites, or take like a basic
photo at a company event or whatever you need to do so that you have stuff
to at least pull from in the beginning. It also might be a part of your
job to work with other teams. So if they're, if you're working in
corporate, or even if you're working as a freelancer, they have a larger
team with a, you know, maybe creative team, a video team, a photo team,
a graphic design team, you need to communicate to them what you need. Hey, I need a batch of
30 testimonial graphics. You know, we need to plan
a video shoot where we can. Create some B roll video of product
features, that kind of thing. So that's kind of the next stage
is really bringing this whole strategy to life because without
action, it's just a piece of paper. It's just a PDF. It's just a deck that you put together. So that's really the fun part. That's the part that I actually
love is the content creation. So yeah, that is really what goes
into a social media strategy. I hope this was helpful. Again, if you want to
check out metrical study. With all of their findings from 2023, you
can click the link down in the show notes. I will also leave a link to
the wait list for the social media management accelerator. It'll be back early in 2024. I'm so excited to teach this course
again, and to, uh, be able to help you through some of these. Um, so I'm going to be talking about a
lot of these things that we talked about. And if you have any questions for me, feel
free to leave them down in the comments. If you're on YouTube, please
subscribe to the podcast channel. And I will talk to you in my next episode. Bye.
