Creating the Perfect Social Media Strategy for 2017 in Six Simple Steps

Following a year of Harambe memes, the Mannequin Challenge and Donald Trump, predicting 2017’s social media hits will be increasingly more difficult, and regardless of how crazy they may be, these trends hold the key to our future Social Media success. Therefore, it is important that we use these as inspiration when creating the perfect social media strategy to navigate towards our business goals; and these six simple steps are the best ways to get started.

1. Create and Set Clearly Defined Goals

When creating a successful social media strategy, it is important to first understand what your end goal(s) will be. These should be realistic and challenging but still highly achievable; such as increasing overall website traffic by 50% over the year, increasing engagement by 60% year by year or increasing revenue from social media by 25% over the year. As these are only examples, it is likely that your goals may be completely different, yet, once decided, these can be easily aligned to give you the best shot at achieving them.

2. Identify Your Target Audience

At first glance, identifying a target audience may not appear important when devising yearly strategies, however, this is a factor that constantly changes over time. For small businesses, one of the easiest ways to do so is to look at your current customer base and create a demographic profile based on needs, spending and whether this is the audience you would like to continue targeting or not.

Due to their larger pool of clients, established businesses may find this process much more challenging alone, and this is where analytic tools come into play. These are designed to help you see what types and groups of people naturally gravitate towards you content, through your social media channels, in order to help collate your most popular audiences. Examples of these include Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics, Instagram Analytics and Linkedin Analytics. Even though some may be more useful than others, each give you an insight into how your content is performing on the different social media platforms.

3. Build a Diverse Content Strategy

Social media’s increasing popularity means that there are currently more active daily Facebook users than there were people in existence in 1901. However, the gap between the content published and the content consumed is also rapidly widening, which is why a diverse content strategy is essential for success.

Due to the fast paced nature of society, people in 2017 will require quick, digestible ways to take in information. One great way to do this is to create valuable blog content which, given that it is properly promoted, will act as a first base for attracting your ideal customers to your website.

In saying this, the human brain processes visual data 60,000 times faster than it does dialogue, making enticing graphics and videos just as important for attracting attention to your content. Therefore, it is essential that you find the right balance between text and visuals for your clients, as not every audience will be attracted to the same thing – After all, you don’t want to see a picture of a rat advertised by your favourite restaurant do you?!

4. Set a Social Media Advertising Budget

It is estimated that social media advertising will comprise over 20% of marketing budgets within the next five years. Therefore, 2017 is the year to invest a strategically used budget into your social advertising, as this is the most cost effective way to reach your target audience when they are most engaged.

5. Go Mobile

A recent survey showed that, as a society, we are so addicted to our mobile phones that 68% of us perceive vibrations when there is no notification to show, simply because our brains have become functioned to expect one! Due to this ‘addiction’, 2017 is the year for your social media strategy to go mobile first. This will require mobile friendly content, advertisements and most importantly, a mobile friendly website. And with 80% of social media time spent on mobile devices, why wouldn’t you optimize your mobile based social media strategy?

6. Ditch The Automated Apps… NOW!

Let’s face it, we live in a society of time savers, so it won’t be a shock to discover the vast number of apps out there that aim to save you time through automated social media responses. Even though these are great for time saving and staying connected, having a robot running your social media can easily prevent you from fully engaging with your audience and reaping the benefit of your strategy.

As a Digital Marketing Executive, I spend my days replying to Auto DMs – ‘Thanks for the follow, why not like our Facebook page?’ ‘Thanks for the RT’ etc etc… But do we really need to spend valuable time replying? No. Because the sad truth is, these people are robots: R2D2, Wall-E, Hal – They’re not even there, they won’t respond, and if you rely on automated responses to drive engagement, you won’t receive anywhere near the amount of potential engagement.

In reality, social media does work. Here at Bee Social, we have built a successful business over the last 4 years simply by getting results for our clients, and, let’s face it, they wouldn’t stay with us or continue to pay if we didn’t! So if you are using apps to automate, do yourself a favour; Turn them off and show the world how fabulous you are, it’s time to get social!

Should you need help with your Social Media Strategy for 2017, please get in touch.