How to Develop a Social Media Strategy Step by Step

if it's just a vanity metric if they just want more likes or just want more followers you all know as well as i do that those things mean nothing without action hey everyone what's up welcome back to the freelance friday podcast so welcome back to the podcast you guys i want to read a quick apple podcast review for you all this one comes from ceramics business ceramics business says that this podcast is so relatable even outside your field i really appreciate latasha's friendly professional and authentic thoughts as a listener you feel like you're talking to someone who knows their stuff but also like you are having a professional coffee date with a close friend honest open and gets into the grit we are having a coffee day thank you so much i love that review that was so nice so today i'm talking about social media strategy this is a really big question a really big important thing for anyone out there who is a social media manager i know a lot of you all are and even if you're not i think this is going to be helpful for you because you probably need to use social media for your business or you know your brand or whatever it is that you are doing so here's how to create a social media strategy this is the blueprint so the first thing that you need to do is set goals and i'm going to be speaking from a client service provider relationship so i'm going to be sharing with you guys how i uh you know start these conversations with my clients and get them all set up and all that but again you can apply this to your own business or whatever you want to do with it so set goals is the first thing that you're going to need to do when somebody reaches out to me and they say hey latasha can you help us develop a social media strategy i say absolutely what are your business goals that's literally like the next question that comes out of my mouth when i have those conversations and i need to know what their their regular business goals are so that way i can take those business goals and i can create my own social media specific goals and from there what's going to be the output from that is metrics that we can measure you know as tangible as you can get in a digital medium so let me give you an example e-commerce is probably always the easiest one to share because it's the easiest to measure so an e-commerce company let's say that they are a footwear brand they want to sell more shoes and in particular they want to sell more of a specific type of shoe maybe they're an athletic shoe company but they want people to know that they have casual sandals too and so they're really looking to boost sales in that specific category so what i'm going to do is i'm going to say okay great so we are going to have a goal of getting more conversion goals completed so that means sales you know clicks over to our website things like that and then those metrics that can actually measure especially if they have tracking set up properly which they should have like google analytics facebook pixel all that i can actually track through okay here's how many sales came from social media or if you know maybe they're like a very new brand they don't have that sophisticated of tracking on their website i can at least say hey i sent 500 people over to your website from social media last month and that is going to be the closest that you can get because obviously you know if somebody's clicking over to the website on a sales type post likely they're going to buy or at least they're interested in purchasing so that is kind of the full path and you have to have you have to have a goal right you have to because i could take that same shoe company and i could say awesome you you want me to do your social media we don't talk about goals and i say awesome i'm going to grow their social media following so much and i'm going to do nothing but influence or collaborations i might buy some you know followers which you guys know i don't recommend but i could a lot of social media strategists do that and they're going to be really impressed because i'm going to get them a million followers by the end of the year but if they didn't get any sales from those million followers it literally means nothing obviously they would probably get something i would hope from a million followers but you know that might not be their main goal their main goal might not be followers on the contrary sometimes the client will come to me and say we want a bunch of followers and i'm like okay cool why like tell me tell me what the thought process is on why you want to grow your following they'll be like oh yeah we want more sales and i'm like well maybe what you need to do is just reach your existing following a little better obviously i'm never going to say you don't want to grow your following but focusing on those metrics can sometimes be a little bit of recipe for disaster if it's you know if it's just a vanity metric if they just want more likes or just want more followers you all know as well as i do that those things mean nothing without action so it might really be that we need to actually boost our engagement so that our posts start showing up in our followers feeds more and you know our existing followership actually buys from us and sees what we have going on and what we have to sell to them so uh yeah goals super important and it's important to be aligned with this too with your with your client to like be on the same page about it from day one let them know okay we have this conversation so these are my social goals these are the metrics i can provide you at the end of every month the you know and be in communication about it so that there's no surprise that they're not they're not surprised for better for worse i mean i guess for better is good under promise over deliver is never a bad thing but you definitely want to be on the same page about goals i personally always use the smart acronym specific measurable attainable relevant and timely and that's how i formulate my goals because even even the example that i shared with the shoe company they want to sell more uh slides or sandals or whatever what is more like one more 20 more a thousand more 10 000 more units like you do have to know that as well especially when you're doing like paid advertising because i'm gonna need a way different paid budget for 10 000 more units versus like 20 more units timelines when do they want to sell those buy do they want to increase those sales over a three year period or do they want to increase those sales over like the next week that's also very important and it's going to affect your strategy your budget the price that you're taking because you're going to be working overtime if they want to sell 10 000 units in a week you know all that stuff is super important to get on the same page about so specific measurable attainable relevant timely those are your goals next thing you're going to want to do is do some persona research you're going to want to understand who the heck you're selling to or talking to on social media so hopefully your client is going to know this and this is like question two that i asked them i said great i know your goals so who are we talking to here who is your audience who are your customers what types of people tend to you know buy from you who are you trying to reach because that might be two different things their typical customers might be one thing their goal customers or clients might be somebody else so important to have those conversations there and hopefully they will know and these are also really good um conversations to have to kind of gauge your customer engage your clients and maybe get an understanding of what type of client they're going to be because when i have a client who doesn't know any of these answers it scares me a little bit i'm gonna be honest i mean it's my job to help them through a lot of this stuff and make those recommendations of you know doing as much research as i can but maybe they need to pull in like a you know a research tool or something as well it's my job to make those recommendations but at the same time i mean i'm a business owner i can tell you five things about my following or my ideal client just off the top of my head and you should be able to i think as a business owner i think it's important to be able to speak to those things you might not know the social specific versions of those things you know i don't i don't personally know how to do google ads very well so if i were to say hey i want to run some google ads and go to an agency or a freelancer i could tell them a few things about my search traffic or my ideal client who i'm trying to reach i might not know how to put those into google terms like i might not know the targeting layers available for google but i can tell them in plain speech i want to reach startup people in these specific geographic locations and blah blah blah blah so i'm not saying it's a full-on red flag but they should be able to work with you and i think if they're not willing to like work with you and do a little research do a little digging themselves do some exercises maybe that you provide them that's not really a good sign you know you're you're not like a footwear expert right like you're a social media manager so you do need them to work with you i think this is super important anyway tangent there but persona research who are they trying to reach um anything is helpful here age gender geographic location any types of like um cultural references that they like like maybe they like shit's creek is that what it's called i don't know why that's like the first tv show that came to mind for me but maybe they like that show maybe they like game of thrones maybe they like video games maybe they like sports like all of those things are gonna help influence the tone and voice that you're gonna use in your social media messaging so like game of thrones was huge that was like a cultural phenomenon right and i know i mean tons of brands you know tweeted along with the show and like injected their brand in it somehow starbucks for example remember when the starbucks cup was left on the production room um you know in the shot i mean just knowing things like that so you can make jokes and be culturally relevant and use the right tone and voice is super important so get as much of that as you can if they really don't know that stuff again hopefully they're going to be willing to work with you and they should be able to at least help pull their analytics for you slash you can do this yourself if you have access to their accounts look at who is currently following them go into your facebook page insights go into instagram insights twitter doesn't really have analytics anymore unfortunately uh linkedin is pretty kind of limited i need to do an update on my analytics series actually maybe i'll do that soon but look at who's currently following them if they do have anything of a following if they have nothing of a following then that's a little bit challenging as well but you can still do some research look at their website information so if they have google analytics or even just like squarespace's native analytics and wordpress like their native analytics i'm pretty sure it gives you a little bit of information about at least geographic location of where people are coming from so you can gather little tidbits here and there you can also do some of your own kind of diy market market research so you can post into facebook groups forums you know look on reddit look on i can never say this word properly i think it's kia ora quora i don't know how to say it but that website just like start searching around and see handbags you know okay your client is a handbag company start typing handbag into kiara luxury bag like whatever it is and see what questions people are asking see what types of people are asking those questions and so on and so forth and just take note of those things because you do you really have to understand who you're talking to if you want your message to get across properly next thing that i recommend doing is competitor research so very similar to market research you're just gonna take a look at what their competitors are doing if my client is louis vuitton i'm going to take a look at you know i don't know chloe and dior um and take a look at their you know what they're doing to promote their handbags or their their design house or whatever so real simple stuff here just take a look at like how often they're posting on their social channels which social channels they're leveraging i think this is really important because you don't have to be on every social platform i mean i think that's like one of the biggest myths in social media strategy today is that you need to be doing everything and you don't especially if you are a freelancer watching this a one one person show you realistically unless they're paying you a lot of money and you have a lot of time you probably are not going to be doing like 10 social media platforms for them you're probably going to be focusing on like a handful and doing a really good job and maybe repurposing content for the other ones but you're probably not going to be like creating original content for like linkedin instagram twitter youtube facebook podcast i mean that's not really social media but whatever you're probably not going to be doing that right so take a look at what the competitors are on so that way you know either to one of two things one where there's a gap in the market because sometimes that can be fun if there's no podcast about handbags maybe that's a good area of opportunity if the demographics line up you know your ideal client demographics line up with podcast listenership maybe that's a gap in the market that you can kind of um take you know you can you can take that over or you can follow their lead so if you're seeing oh my gosh this company is getting such good traffic engagement all that stuff from instagram we need to be on instagram they're selling so much on instagram then be on instagram but it you know it can do a couple of different things it can teach you what to do or what not to do really let's take a look at platforms posting frequency just the types of content that they're posting again you can take a look at who's following them any public data that you can see like see what types of people are following them maybe some other brands that their followers tend to follow so you can kind of paint a picture of that persona so do a little bit of competitor research and this is really helpful too to get buy-in from the client so especially when i work with more corporate companies or even startups who have like investors and stuff that they need to kind of get approval on for everything if i can say okay well you know i'm making this completely up these are none of my clients but like my client is honda well let's look at what chevrolet is doing and typically the investor or the manager or the owner is going to be like oh okay cool with the competitors doing that we need to do that like if they're running facebook ads we uh here's some budget for facebook ads so it can help with getting that buy-in if you kind of give that like well everybody else is doing it it's kind of like when i don't have kids but like i just feel like all of my parent friends are like yeah like my kid is like well so-and-so has a phone already so i bought him a phone or like he has an ipad so i bought him an ipad you know it's the same kind of thing except with it's data driven you know it's done for a good reason it's not done for selfish causes okay so competitor analysis and these are all things too by the way really you know i guess goal setting not so much but persona research competitor analysis this next thing that i'm going to mention social audit these are all things that you can price out individually as well so if you are going to do you know monthly social media management for a client if you got to do all these steps as you can see this is like a lot of work i mean this is like weeks of work on its own you can charge that you can price that into your startup fee so the first month you're going to be doing a strategy an audit a competitor analysis all this stuff tax some money on to that first month because you're going to be working a lot so that's what i do and then that way you can also price it out individually if people come to you because sometimes people do as again especially my corporate clients they'll come to me and be like hey can you do a social media strategy for us once per year so i'm not actually doing the stuff like their in-house people are implementing this stuff but they want me to come in and do their strategy work so obviously i need to have that price in my head so i can charge for that then you're going to do the social audits so this is really going to be taking a look at what they're already doing now if this is a brand new company you're launching the social channels for them you've taken that persona research that competitor research and decided all right your target audience is women ages 40 to 55. in the suburbs we're going to be on facebook number one and probably maybe instagram too you know look at like the platform stats and demographics and stuff do a little bit of research on your own to determine which platforms they need to be on okay cool you're good there but if they have an existing social presence that has already been going on before you either started out by them by a social media manager an agency whatever i want you to audit that because just because they have been doing something doesn't mean it's right necessarily it's what they should be doing so develop your own little set of criteria here take a look at uh you know just some baseline metrics and this is important for you selfishly too so that you can develop a case study and and this is something that like i've always forgotten to do and i still always forget to do is write down how many followers and you know what the average engagements were when i started working with a client because like i always forget until i've been working with them for five minutes months and it's like wait now i can't tell the whole story so that's what an audit can help you do you know get a kind of benchmark of where they're at right now how many followers they have how many engagements they're getting what content is performing really well what their uh you know analytics are showing as far as their followership data demographic data all that a preliminary report essentially and take a look at what's working and what's not and again sometimes this stuff will really surprise you i i will have in my mind like oh my gosh like these quote images do so well and then you pull the data and you're like these things are not doing anything for us or maybe they're getting like a ton of likes but nobody is clicking nobody's clicking on those links or vice versa so it's always good to do that next thing you're going to want to do from there is develop the infrastructure so this typically especially for a new company is going to be setting up a scheduling tool and a process for them so again your established companies probably already have a tool that they use and they might just onboard you onto that and show you how they use it get you a seat get you access to that but if you're doing everything yourself you're going to need to figure out do we use a scheduling tool am i going to post things natively how are we going to get the content calendars approved do i need approval you got to figure all that stuff out and then i also often especially if this is a new company go in and do sops or standard operating procedures for them if they don't have any yet and again this is another upsell and this is something that i do a lot of actually uh i think partially because i do have that like corporate background and i do a lot of training and coaching and courses so i have that um i don't know i'm kind of like a natural i naturally want to teach and document things in some way so i often will upsell that so i'll say cool like i can give you your sops meaning this is what we do and when we do it this is how the content calendars get approved uh here's an example of our escalation process so if there's a customer service issue what we do what the social media manager does with it all the numbers that they need to call if there's an emergency document that all and you can get you guys can have this you can have this whether you stay with me or not you know if you want to give this to your admin after i leave or whatever so um that's all what i kind of consider infrastructure setting up the scheduling tool doing the sops all of that good stuff and then really the last thing is just putting together a content calendar so i mean it's like the last thing but it's like the hardest thing really because it it's putting everything into motion so i personally really like the scheduling tools that i use are loomly and hootsuite but honestly lately i've been using facebook creator studio so i've been scheduling natively onto facebook and instagram and it's been doing me well but again you want to try out these different platforms scheduling tools figure out what works for you and start building your content calendar regardless of the scheduling tool that i use i typically will just build out a content calendar in like an excel spreadsheet real simple just like post image post copy link hashtags and i'll just create a you know google sheet send it over to the client get their approval get their feedback on it and that's how i'll start posting so that's really what a social media strategy is you know some or more formal than others if a client specifically is like we need a social media strategy um then i'm gonna make sure it's a really pretty nice document that has all of this information wrapped up into it whereas if it's just for me like some of my clients could care less then maybe it's just a document that i have on hand that's kind of saying okay we're going to post you know images behind the scenes images three times per week we're gonna post stories every day we're gonna post quote images twice a week like whatever that is for me so that i know when i'm creating a content calendar every week or every month however you like to do it um you know what to do so and as far as content calendars i usually usually actually do them week by week i was doing them month by month for a long time and because social and the internet moves so quickly i think it's really important to leave some room for like real time stuff and i felt like i was moving things around a lot so i do things weekly but it never hurts to have posts on hand so if you want to do a month of evergreen posts which means a post that kind of never goes old it's just kind of like standard maybe boilerplate type messaging it's never a bad idea to have a bunch of those on hand so you can just throw them in when um you need some content but i really hope this was helpful for you guys this is how you create a social media strategy these are the things that are really important to know before going in and starting to just post i mean and and just to back things up a little bit you know when is client let's say i get a client today they sign they pay and they're like yeah we want a strategy we want monthly posts you know all that stuff it doesn't mean that i'm not going to post until i have all this stuff done like in the beginning is going to be a little bit of testing and that's really a part of it too because all the data might say you should post this kind of post and sometimes things will surprise you so i'm still posting kind of testing things out but i really am developing this more formal strategy as i'm getting things going and i i will let them know typically like okay on month two like the end of month one i'm going to have a formal strategy for you and month one i'm kind of just gonna be like fixing a lot of things and testing a lot of things and all that good stuff so that's what's up hope that was helpful yeah definitely be sure to subscribe to my youtube channel if you're watching on youtube hit that bell button as well if you want to be notified whenever i post new episodes of the podcast and new regular youtube videos i post twice a week hopefully if i'm doing this correctly and if you are listening to the show be sure to review my show on apple podcasts it really helps people uh learn what we're all about and join this community and get the knowledge that hopefully they are craving you can do that on youtube as well i'm gonna link it down in the description box if you want to review the show and tune in next week for a brand new episode i post every single friday thanks for watching and listening bye thanks for tuning in to today's episode show notes for this episode are available at latashajambs.com podcast and contain all of the links i may have mentioned today as well as an invitation to join my private facebook group the freelance friday podcast community thanks so much we'll talk soon

Channel: Latasha James

Views: 396,958

Rating: 4.9173956 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: PKUn7wU5sIc

Length: 24min 57sec (1497 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 11 2020