Social Media Marketing: Strategy and Optimization

Start with SWOT Analysis

In a social media audit, you'll examine your social and digital properties through a critical and curious lens. You're looking at your strengths and challenges, your paid, earned and owned media and how well your team is achieving its goals. Pay attention to what your competitors are doing and how successful they are. Assess the landscape and listen to conversations your customers, suppliers, competitors, employees, and other stakeholders are having. Questions to ask:

1.Who are you trying to reach?

2.What platforms do they use?

3.What's your organization currently doing? Versus what are you doing well?

4. Where are the gaps, challenges, strengths and weaknesses?

5.Are there internal barriers to change?

6.Are your social media programs tied to your business goals?

Driving Data driven decisions

Post the audit we must ask these question to arrive up at an understanding of what our data needs to communicate

1.What times of day work best for your posts and why?

2.Is there a consistency to your engagement or does it vary?

3. What does your CRM, or customer relationship management data, tell you to support or refute your observation?

4. Do they respond better to videos or infographics?

Don't just create content in a vacuum and rely on your gut to determine what works. Instead, dig into your data, analyze it and watch how your customers behave. Also, one viral success is not a social media strategy.

Major Platforms' Driving Forces:

Facebook: Mass media of social platforms

· Facebook is a social networking equivalent of mass media. It's important to remember, Facebook's primarily a paid platform and from a cost perspective, it does provide a good ROI.

· Facebook offers sophisticated targeting options, including location, demographics, connections, behavior, and interests.

· You can also reach people who've already interacted with your brand or create custom or lookalike audiences for a wider reach.

· Facebook's dynamic ads use machine learning to personalize ads to the audience you're trying to reach.

· Facebook Stories ads, lets companies direct customers to Messenger so they can start a one to one conversation with them. Or you could develop a Messenger chatbot.

· If your customers passionate about your products and services? One might want to develop a group catered to their interests and needs.

· Facebook livestream video could be an ideal way to engage customers by teasing out new offerings, showing behind the scenes content, and launching products.

Instagram: Engaging customers visually

Instagram described as the perfect blend of art and commerce. Instagram has been working hard to become a new mall.

· Instagram offers several ad formats, including photo ads, videos, stories ads, swipe up-able collections and ads in its explore tab. You can target customers by location, demographics, behavior, customer look-alike audiences and automatic targeting.

· Users can find and shop for products right in the app. All they have to do is click on the shopping bag on photos and videos

· Some restaurants even alter their lighting and decor to make sure their place looks good in photos. They're trying to give customers an instaworthy experience.

· Instagram has a blog that provides brands with tips and creative inspiration to get the most out of the app.

· Instagram spawned its own group of influencers, whether celebrities, nano or micro-influencers with under 10 thousand followers. And brands can work with influencers to help increase the reach and authenticity of your campaign.

· Instagram borrowed from Snapchat and launched Instagram Stories. With Stories, users and companies can create short and fun sequential video and photo moments complete with GIFs, text, doodles and augmented reality. And brands can save their best videos as Stories Highlights that appear on top of your feed and showcase your company's culture and personality.

· Creating a hashtag encourages customers to tag their own photos and stories that the company could comment on or reshare.

The key to Instagram is visual creativity.

Snapchat: Showcase your brand's creativity

Snapchat attracts a young audience, who spend a considerable amount of time on the app. Snapping positions itself as a camera company and not a social network.

A lot of people on Snapchat create personal icons, or bitmoji, really cartoon-like caricatures of themselves.

Snapchat is also a place for publishers and media companies, like Vice, NBC, People Magazine, and Comedy Central. They use their discover channels to develop original content for the app

Snap Maps show users what their friends are doing and also hot spots of activity in your community or around the world.

Snapchat's ad products include Snap Ads, Collection ads for e-commerce, Story ads, AR ads, filters, and non-skippable video.

Twitter: Real-time news, video, and customer service

It's the place we discover the latest information or breaking news. In fact, Twitter's CMO called it a place to see what's happening right now.

Cons: Twitter's been making adjustments like adding better controls over how you hide replies or block cyberbullies and moving to a simplified algorithmic newsfeed that shows you more content they think you'll like.

Live Streaming opportunities: Twitter's putting a big emphasis on video and especially live streaming. They've partnered with big sports, entertainment, and news outlets to be a source of live video content like the Oscars' Red Carpet pre-show. In addition to taking users behind the scenes, this offers brands a chance to engage with customers virtually at a major event.

Direct Messaging: Some of Twitter's other features include DM or Direct Message Cards for customer service.

Twitter lists are a great way to organize who you follow by theme, you can add your top customers and influencers to a list. This curates a feed where you can see what they're talking about without the distractions of the main feed. And it lets you find opportunities where your brand can jump into a conversation or help in a more natural way.

Twitter's approach to advertising is built around the concept of Promoted Tweets.

You can use Promoted Tweets to build followers or engagement, increase web traffic, generate awareness for apps, or use Quick Promote to amplify an individual tweet fast.

Twitter also offers Promote Mode, a monthly subscription that automatically boosts all your brand tweets.

LinkedIn: Social networking for business professionals

LinkedIn's become the "Wall Street Journal" of the social media world. These days, it provides great options for business, including publishing, live video and ads.

· It's also a place to build and manage your professional network, discover and follow companies and influencers and yes, find a job. LinkedIn's publishing tools let you create content and position yourself or your business as a thought leader.

· Use hashtags to make your posts and updates more discoverable and follow hashtags your industry is using to stay on top of news and trends and decide if there's a topic where you can add value.

· When you have a company page, you can invite followers, promote your posts and content and create text ads, dynamic ads, customize to your audience or prospects and sponsored InMail messages.

· LinkedIn lets you target by location, company, education, demographics, experience and interest and its matched audiences give companies several options to get your content in front of the people you're trying to reach.

· Recently, video's become a bigger part of the LinkedIn experience. Users can record and upload mobile video to make updates more visually engaging with behind the scenes video of your company or a new product launch

· LinkedIn Live lets brands live stream video like events and company news

· With LinkedIn Groups, you can create and manage a community, exchange ideas, share links and collaborate. The key is to start organically and post content your customers want and need or answer questions they may have. As with any relationship, it takes time, but with a good moderator and an engaged community, you can turn your group into brand ambassadors or advocates.

· LinkedIn is the only B2B-exclusive social media platform.

YouTube Video Influencer, Ads

YouTube is most people's go-to video platform and the second largest search engine after Google.

· YouTube has spawned its own stars and influencers who are sometimes more popular than celebrities and many of them are open to working with brands. Start by searching the keywords your customers are using to see which YouTubers appear at the top. Then do some additional research on them and the types of content they post, what they're engagement is and whether they're open to working with brands.

· YouTube TV is a subscription service that lets you watch and stream network shows to any device.

· YouTube Originals are premium content and if a creator has more than 1,000 subscribers, they can livestream directly to their fans on a mobile device. But most channels have the opportunity

· You can purchase a variety of ad formats on YouTube including pre-roll and mid-roll video, TrueView ads that viewers can skip after they play for five seconds, video overlays, video and rich media mastheads, shopping ads and other digital display formats

Your brand can succeed on YouTube if you move away from the dream of virality and create videos that help, educate or entertain your customers.

Pinterest: Digital Mall

Pinterest, the ultimate social scrapbook, is aspirational, stylish, sharable, and shoppable.

Pinterest breakout features lends its visual search function, all you do is click on the camera icon in the top right of the search bar, take a photo of whatever you're interested in, and

Pinterest will show you organic and sponsored pins that are similar to what's in your photo. Your brand can advertise and amplify posts on Pinterest in a number of ways, and all of them center on promoted pins.

Pinterest is also using AI to let people fine tune the types of pins they see in their home feed. That means relevance and relationships are more important than ever because when your brand comes up with an image of what people are looking for, that's like a pin made in heaven.