Here's an easy guide to how you can create one from scratch.
In this day and age, everyone uses social media. Ever since Covid-19, successful businesses have attributed their success to being able to adapt their business operations, and leverage on the power of social media to get the word out. You might ask, how can I leverage on social media to maximise my efforts? Simple answer - by building a solid social media plan! Read below to find out how to get started.
Here are 6 steps to help you get started on your social media marketing plan.
Step 1 Choose your social media platform
Step 2 Fill up your profile completely
Step 3 Find your voice and tone
Step 4 Pick your posting strategy
Step 5 Analyse and test
Step 6 Automate and engage.”
Step 1 - Choose your social media platform
With the rise of Tik Tok, which is the social media platforms that will benefit my business the most? Consider 3 things - your target audience, time and resources.
Target audience - How old are they? What platforms are they usually on? If your business targets young adults aged 28 years old and below, use Instagram. If they are teens, use Tik Tok. For more mature users and audiences, choose Facebook. If you are running a B2B company, you might even consider using LinkedIn. Ideally, your aim should be focusing your efforts on platforms that your primary target audiences use.
Time - How much time do you have to devote to social media marketing? If you run your own small company and are responsible for multiple things, you might want to think of choosing to focus your efforts on just 1 or 2 platforms instead of all of them. Remember, the quality of your posts and its consistency contribute to your brand image too.
Resources - Do you have the resources to do up the creatives such as photography, videography, graphic design? Platforms such as Tik Tok and Instagram are heavier on quality content, images and videos.
Step 2 - Fill up your profile completely
A completed profile would shows that you are serious in engaging your customers. A clear description would allow potential customers to know what business you are running.
Visuals such as your profile picture, cover photo and having some initial content on your page would show that you have a genuine business page. This gives customers the confidence to buy your product or engage your services.
Step 3 - Find your voice and tone
“Be original, show off your style, and tell your story.”
It's always easy to jump right in and start posting your first post. However, take some time to figure out what tone of voice you would like to use in all your posts before starting.
First, think about the persona you would like your brand to carry. You could ask yourself some questions such as, if your brand was a person, what would his/her personality be like? What would he/she be wearing? What's their relationship to the consumer? How do you want your customers to think about your business?
Some brands use a colloquial Singlish slang and write content in a very informal manner. This resonates with a certain target audience who may find this fun, funny and interesting, at the same time matching the type of products that they sell or services that they provide. An example of such a brand is https://www.facebook.com/ahbengfoodiesg/.
Step 4 - Pick your posting strategy
How do you know how much content do you need to post? There is no hard and fast rule on this, but a rule of thumb we use is to post 3 times a week; about 12 times a month. This gives your customers some breathing room, and space between days. Modern day consumers are extremely against ads, and the last thing we want to do is to lose followers as a result of being overly pushy or spammy. Having said that, there is no one fixed rule for the number of posts that goes out. Every brand works differently. If your business has a lot of updates and happenings (e.g. a shopping mall), you might be posting once a day, or even more than once a day.
Next, how do you know what to post? Video posts gets more views, shares, likes than any other posts; Facebook and Instagram's algorithms tend to push video posts up more. However, since creating video content is extremely time consuming, you can balance it out with still-visual posts as well to keep your business at the top of your consumers minds.
Step 5 - Analyse, test and repeat
After a month of posting content on your social media page, analyse the results. Compare the posts among each other. Is there a type of post that does better than the rest? Try to find a pattern or trend with the type of posts that go out.
Look at the engagement levels, likes, shares, reach. You should be seeing an increasing trend as the number of fans on your page grow. Using these statistics, set benchmarks for your social media page.
Try using new things to see what works or does not work. Change the style of your captions, use different post formats. Does Facebook live videos do better for your brand? Do longer or shorter videos do better? If they perform well, continue to create such content!
Step 6 - Automate and engage
Lastly utilise an automation tool such as Buffer or make use of Facebook's free content automation tool to post on your social media platforms so that you do not have to manually do the postings yourself!
It also does not end there. You would also need to constantly engage with your customers whenever they send you a message or post a comment. Set back a time such as 4pm everyday to reply these messages. Where you can, quickly reply your followers.