How To Conquer A Social Media Strategy For The First Time - Part 1

Welcome to How To Conquer A Social Media Strategy For The First Time Part 1! At Disrupt Digital, we have created & monitored numerous different strategies over the past year so we know that creating a Social Media Strategy for the first time can be overwhelming. We have broken the steps into different parts. We are starting with what do you want to achieve by investing in social media marketing?

1. Determine your objectives. This is about setting goals that you want your business to achieve by using social media as a means of marketing. What are your primary reasons for using social media? Do you want to have increased; Website visits, Brand awareness, Engagement. Be clear in what you want to achieve. Beginning to market across a variety of social media platforms with no defined goals does not equal success. We recommend starting off with a simple goal here. The clearer the objective, the easier it will be to measure.

2. Get to know your competitors & audience. Choose a competitor with a similar target audience. Check out their voice, branding & types of strategies they are using. We found this helpful for new brands that didn't have a defined presence on line yet. This gave a great indication for what an audience reacted to. We aren't assuming that your competitors know exactly what they are doing either but you can compare & contrast what worked & what did not.

3. Metrics. Metrics are essential. Get comfortable with this term. Whatever your goals for marketing on social media you need to know if it is working. If you want to measure engagement, then look for metrics around shares, comments & replies. Make sure to respond & interact. Take note of how many people are participating & how often are they participating. This will give you an indication of how successful the post is. This is also a more personalised approach to engaging directly with your audience. It shows that you appreciate their engagement. If you want to measur awareness, then use metrics like volume, reach, exposure, and amplification. How far is your message spreading? Tracking website visitors from your social media accounts to your business site it to track 'bounce rate' as this allows you to track viewers that come to your site from social networks, & compare that rate to visitors who found your site using a direct search or other paid advertisements. For the best results, your social media bounce rate should be lower than other sources you may have used, this gives you a clear indication of how well you have set up your targeting system. Stay tuned for Part 2!