How to Create Strategic Social Content [Easy and Fun to Do!]

So, you want to start creating content, but you have no idea where to start or what to do. Well, you came to the right place! I will be teaching you the basics to creating a strategic social content plan and what you should and shouldn't do with your content.

What are My Goals?

You may already have your reason as to why you want to make content, but just in case, ask yourself, "What is it that you want from social media anyways?" Are you doing it because you are obligated to, or are you just doing it for fun like I do with my YouTube channel? For me, I feel like some people don't have a clear thought in mind on what they really want to make content on and they are just doing it because they feel like they have a responsibility to. Most of the time, however, I can tell that most people keep on doing what they love doing because it's fun! To reiterate again, make sure that whatever you're doing, only do it if you believe that you will have a blast doing it again and again!

Who is My Audience?

Once you figure out your goals that you came up with for your content, you need to figure out who your target audience is going to be. According to SproutSocial, only 55% of marketers, that's us, use social media data so that we can understand our target audience better. It might seem like a long and tedious thing to do, but in the long run it will definitely pay off because you will have a better idea as to what your audience pays attention to more and which types of social media platforms to use more than the others.

What are Metrics and How Do I Use Them?

Right now, you're probably wondering what I mean by metrics and what use you have for using them. It's relatively easy to figure out. Basically, you're paying attention to your content's reach, clicks, engagement, and hashtag performance. Reach is the amount of people that actually saw your content. Clicks are the number of clicks on your content itself. Engagement is the number of interactions with your content divided by the number of impressions. It's also a better way of seeing how your audience sees you and if they want to interact with your content.

Choosing My Content

There are many different types of content you can create to catch many different people's attention. There are blog posts, GIF images, photos, video clips, full videos, infographics, and many more. Currently, the most popular type of content that is out there is videos. According to HubSpot, 82% of internet video traffic currently makes up that much of the total consumer internet traffic this year. I'm not saying you can't make content with anything else other than video, but it might not get as much traffic as you would have originally liked. All in all, stick to making the type of content that you believe will work the best with your image in mind.

Timing is Everything!

The time of day and the day of the week are really important in figuring out when your target audience is online and using the internet the most. When you post your content online, you need to be ready to engage with your audience, so if you were to choose to upload content late at night, not only would that not be a very good time to post said content, but nobody would be ready to respond to anything either. The other thing you need to remember to do is if someone responds back to your online content, you need to respond back ASAP. Otherwise, they possibly won't believe that you are the best at what you do.

What's Next?

Now that you have figured out all of the previous sections I mentioned above, now is the time to look at what content is working, what content is not working, and lastly, how you will try to improve on what you can do better. This mainly wraps around your content that is performing very well and making any needed adjustments to other parts of your content that you know you could do better on or the content that didn't do so well , but you now know what you need to do to make it work and make it even better!

Thank you so much for reading this post, everyone! I hope this all helps you in figuring out what type of content you want to make and also how and where you're going to post it online.

What is Social Media Listening and Steps To Make it Work [6 Ways to Make Social Listening Easier!]

So, you may be wondering or asking yourself "What is social media listening and how do I use it?" Well, you came to the right place because that's what I'm going to talk about with you today. Not only that, but I'll also help you make it easier to learn why it's good to do some listening.

What is social media listening? Well, besides the fact that some people call it social listening for short, according to Cyberclick, it's basically the continuous monitoring and analysis of social media channels for positive and negative mentions and feedback about your company's brand, products, services, and then using that information to take action. This means that you're constantly looking out for specific words or keywords that someone online may mention, whether they relate to your company or your competitor's company.

Here are the steps you need to take into consideration when learning how to do social listening:

1. Choose a tool.
2. Choose your keywords.
3. Choose your platforms.
4. Analyze and take action.

 

1. Choosing a Tool

Regarding how you'll keep track of when someone online mentions your business, you will need a tool to monitor keywords, phrases, and topics that relate to what your company does. An example of a tool that would work and be easy to work with would be HubSpot because it gives you a lot of the important measuring factors for you to use like what was mentioned up above.

 

2. Choosing your keywords

Keywords are what help an article or YouTube video become more known to the public by you entering words that you believe other people will use to find said article or video in the first place. Another way of simplifying what I mean for finding what you can make keywords from is taking your brand's name and handles, your product's names, and even their misspellings, your competitors' brand names product names, and handles, industry buzzwords, your company's slogan, campaign names, and lastly, even unbranded hashtags that are related to the industry.

3. Choosing your platforms

Now after all of the preparations you've made, you've got to choose where you will be conducting your listening. There are a lot of social media platforms to choose from, but it would probably be best to use the most well known ones instead since you know what to expect from them. Now there are two different approaches to this: B2B and B2C. If you choose to go the route of B2B (Business-to-Business), then you'd be better off with choosing LinkedIn, Reddit, Twitter or YouTube to get the word out there to other businesses. If you choose B2C (Business-to-Consumer), then utilizing all of the platforms including Facebook and Instagram, will help you to reach an even wider audience.

4. Analyzing and taking action

After all of what you've learn so far, make sure that it all doesn't go to waste. As long as you keep on checking your data and what you collected from listening, then you should be golden. All in all, everything that I've talked about will help influence the decisions you make, so make sure that you make great decisions!

Before I Go

Before I go, I just wanted to let you all know about some benefits of conducting a social media listening strategy and what this means for you.

So far, all I've found for the benefits conducting this gets you are six different benefits:

1. Increased engagement opportunities with target audiences.
2. Track and oversee trends.
3. Crisis management.
4. Keeping an eye on competitors.
5. Finding influencers.
6. Event tracking.

 

Increasing Your Engagement

Going along with increasing your chances to engage more with your audience, it will help you to understand more of how your customers think and what you believe they will want from you next.

 

Paying Attention to Those Trends!

The main thing to take from trends is that it can help you grow your research and development team, public relations team, and in taking your company to new heights in new directions!

Crisis Management

If something bad happens, like a customer doesn't like a product and more and more people follow them in the backlash towards the company or if something bad happened to the company, you should always be ready for anything to happen by taking your time and assessing what went wrong and how or if there's a way to fix that wrong.

Knowing What Your Competitors are Doing

If you use keywords that relate to your competitor's products, then it can help you find if the other company has any weak spots that you can then use to your advantage.

Influencers!

You see this all the time, whether it's on TV or your phone, you always see a commercial with some very well known actor, sports player, etc, showing how much they love using this company's product or service. It does take a lot of paperwork to hire someone to be in a commercial, but they can gain a lot of attention faster than one might think to help your brand thrive!

Event Tracking

This one is especially helpful if your company has an event that they are hosting. It helps you to better know how people feel before, during, and after the event happens and what the customer experiences. If something needed to be improved on, now would be the time to address it.

I hope you all were able to make sense of what I have written in my blog post today and I hope y'all were able to talk something from this and be able to apply it to your daily life. Anyways, I hope y'all have a nice day! :D