How To: Business Social Media Strategy - The Basics

1. Welcome to the Course: Hello and welcome to the course. My name is Rachel being, and I'm a social and digital media specialist in today's course we look, but how you can design a social media strategy for your business. The purpose of a social media strategy is to keep your business direction with its social media. It takes into account your business objectives and your customers so that when you're creating content, it's been targeted so that it's more effective as a marketing tool. By the end of the course, you will have a blueprint for a social media strategy that is right for your business. So let's get started before we get started in this course, the first thing I'd like to invite you to do is to come into this course with a bit of a blue sky mindset. Most people in this course will have been doing social media for many years, and they've done little things that have worked on some things that might not have worked. But you're obviously taking this course because you want to learn more about how to create a social media strategy that is more effective for your business. So try and leave some of the tactics and techniques of used in the past to the side and come into this course with a creative open mind with a fresh approach so that we can generate new ideas for your business. We'll be covering a lot today, looking at the essentials of what you need to know to develop a social media strategy. So this is gonna be a very fast course. We're gonna be talking about the essentials so that you can get started on your social media strategy. Sooner we'll be looking at what is social media marketing and how to design a social media strategy. We'll be looking at how to identify your business goals in your business culture and how to identify your customer needs and your target market were recovering. How to actually create a social media strategy, a few business and we'll get hands on as you do that. And we'll be looking at how to turn your social media strategy into tactics so you can start creating content and get started with your social media strategy. Right away you're probably wondering who I am. My name is Rachel Beanie. I'm a freelance digital and social media specialist I've been specialising in social media for eight years, and I've worked across a whole variety of clients. I've worked in digital media agencies. I've worked client side. I worked across finance entertainment. I worked for small businesses, start ups so often, a whole bunch of stuff. And now I'm here to help you with your social media strategy, so let's jump straight into the course. 2. What Is Social Media Marketing?: let's start off with a bit of background on social media marketing. There's a great quote from Eric Coleman that says we didn't have a choice on whether we do social media. It's a question of how will we do it? And what that is really talking about is that social media is now an essential part of our culture and a central part of our marketing for our businesses that we can't afford not to do it. As I said earlier, social media is a form of marketing, and it's one component in part of your marketing. Mix Seymour to things like flyers or billboards or ads on TV or newspaper ads. It's one component off marketing and in the exact same way that flies that you hand out and not seen by everybody, neither a social media and so it's important to understand that there are some limitations to social media as well. Part of why social media is pretty awesome is because it's like the love child of websites and phone calls so it can be used to share information in a broadcast medium, but also interactive and have to wear conversations. Let's face it, social media can be really tough. We've all had bad days, but it's important to understand the limitations of social media so that we can then understand the opportunities. So let's enter a social media strategy with a realistic understanding off social media. Social media is not free. It costs time. So as much as you're not spending large amounts of money on a on a billboard, what you're doing is spending time and stay, creating content and building community to reach large numbers. It can cost money. So if you're willing to get a 1,000,000 new fans, it's likely you'll need to pay to reach those people. The days off, organic reach the builds fans, naturally, a kind of a kind of on the white side now, so we need to adapt of social media strategy for the current day. Most social networks now have an algorithm, which means that not every single post is seen by old fans. One of the best examples of this is a Facebook page. When you post to our Facebook page on, the 10% of your fans will ever see your post unless you pay to have it boosted and served two more fans and, of course, without a strategy, it can feel like you're going nowhere. But it is not all doom and gloom. Social media is still much deeper than traditional advertising. Even if you're paying to boost posts is much cheaper to boost a post and cost on a couple of dollars to serve your post 1000 people, as opposed to paying for an ad on a traditional media network, social media can also be a customer service channel. Instead of getting calls or waiting through emails, you can respond to people using social media. It's also an extension off your brand. It's an opportunity to personify your business and your brand and give people another touch point to your business. One of my favorite parts about social media is the opportunity to build a culture and a community around your business. All of our businesses have communities there there, and this is a chance to extend that and put it online and build a real community around your business. And let's not forget that social media can also be a little bit about risk and mitigation. People are gonna be talking about your business online anyway, even if you were not part of the conversation. So having a social media presence puts you on the front foot to be able to manage those conversations and tell your side of the story. Next up, we're gonna talk about the building blocks for how to design a social media strategy. Let's get into it. 3. Developing a Social Strategy: a strong approach to social media strategy is where you incorporate three pillars off your business. In order to make an effective strategy, you need to keep in mind your business goals. You need to keep in mind the community that exists around your business and also incorporate the culture and values of your business. Combining these three components builds the call of your social media strategy. So before we jump into the three pillars of social media strategy, I want to take a step back a bit and give you some background on sales and marketing theory . The first thing we're gonna cover is the aid of purchase Funnel, and what this is looking at is how people make a decision to buy something. And this is important to understand where social media fits in this funnel so that you can use it more effectively when you're doing your marketing. The aid approach is found is a super old model. It's been around since 18 98 where a guy with a brilliant name Off East and Elmo Lewis came up with his theoretical model. The ADA purchase Funnel is an approach, thinking about the way that people purchase products. So let's talk through each the components of the aid of portraits final. The first phase is getting someone's attention, since where people first notice your product. The interest phase is where people, uh, in the foods and they want to find out a little bit more about your corrupt desire is the consideration process where they're thinking about buying your product. Action is where they actually by the product as market is. The way that we can capitalize on this framework is to create engagements, which suit every phase off the marketing funnel. The sales journey can be quite different, depending on the product. If you're buying a bottle of Coke, it could be a pretty fast process, a new suit or a dress. It might be a bit longer, because you need to make sure it fits and think about the occasions you're wearing it for If you think about purchasing a home loan that can take between 18 months in two years to make that call, the thing to keep in mind with the aid of portraits funnel is that it's a funnel, right? So at the top, you can see it really wide at the bottom. It's quite narrow. That's because people drop off as they go through each face, which isn't actually a bad thing, because when you get to the bottom, these the people who were the true advocates. So you might have huge numbers on your Facebook page. But only a couple of people are converting to buy your product, and that is completely normal in terms of how people purchase things. So I find that a lot of people get quite anxious when people leave their Facebook page or unsubscribe from the news that a list that's okay, because it means that those people, and not as engaged with your products as other people. So you should be focusing on the people who are really engaged with your brand because they're the people who are going to buy from you. Let's talk about how this aid of funnel relates to social media. Let's it off with the attention phase, So this might be the majority of your content. This you saying Hey, this is my business. This is my reasons culture. This is why we're really awesome. The objective of nine absent of your content will be getting attention, so it isn't necessarily about products at all. It's about saying This is my business culture. The interest phase is about making subscribing easy, so what this is is making easy to like your page, and you can encourage that with things that competitions or subscribing to a newsletter. It's a low level commitment to get people to find out more about your business. But as I phase is about making perching intimation easy and accessible. And that could be a tab on your Facebook page. Or it could be a pop up on your website. Or it might be that it's just some of the content you post on social media. It might be that maybe once a week you do a posted to direct cell, depending on your business. In the business model, the action phase is where the customer purchases your product. So that's where they moved from your social media to your shopping cart or to your website . Or they pick up the phone and they call you. Part of why it's important to understand the aid of purchase funnel is because it shows that there are a lot of feelings and emotions that happened with developing a relationship with a customer before they actually make a sale. So you can see that it's about customers getting to know you, getting to know your brand, your values and, of course, short your specials in your deals and a sale doesn't happen instantaneously. So it's about building a relationship over time so that they become a more loyal fan and they purchase your product. Part of why I wanted to highlight this is because when we go further into our social media strategy pillars, you'll see there are a lot of posts that aren't about purchasing. And the reason for that is because the other posts have a different intention. The reason they exist is to help the customer get to know you and your business in more detail. The eight of model isn't the only way to look at the way consumers use your products and interact with your business. The updated consumer journey was created a couple of years ago with the intention of looking at the way that people used brands in a modern digital world, and the idea is that even after you've purchased the product in the by phase, you keep engaging with that community in that culture around that product. We can do our best to try and map ADA to that path, and you can see here there's still attention, interest, desire, sort of matched up in there and the action faces by. But what people are doing then is beyond the by face. They're engaging with it in a whole different way. Let's imagine that you bought a new Fitbit. You're consuming it. You're using the product every day, but you've also joined a Fitbit community online. You also sharing your your runs, but you also sharing your runs with your friends on Facebook as well. So you're consuming the product that you're so sharing it, and then that you're becoming an advocate as well. And you're creating a different brand story for that as well. It's probably likely that you've also joined the Fitbit Facebook page, where you're getting inspiring quotes about other people mean the fitness goals. So what you've done is you've not just bought a product, but you've joined a lifestyle and a community. So it's important to understand that social media isn't just about marketing and making sure people convert. But it's also about developing community and a culture long term before we jump into the social strategy pillars and stop breaking those down. I want to introduce you to the social strategy template, and this is just a quick cheat sheet where you can see your entire social strategy in a single sentence. So the idea is, by the end of today, you'll have filled this out. Having a really strong understanding of the platform you'll be using who you're targeting, the values you're promoting, the product for promoting and and why you're using this. So what your business objective of using social media for your marketing is before we head to the next lecture. What I wanted to do is grab a note pad, grab a pen, grab some paper and get ready to make some notes. Because the next section we're going to be coming up with some big ideas around your business, and I want you to be ready to take some note to make the most of that time. If you want to go digital, that's fine. Grab a Google dog, grab a word, doc, maybe make some notes on your phone. Either way, I want you ready to start thinking about your business in a new way and coming up with these core concepts that'll turn into your social media strategy. 4. Your Business Goals: many, but your note pad. Let's get started on working with the three pillars of a social media strategy. The 1st 1 we're gonna get started with your business goals. Now it's likely that you work with these every single day, so you know exactly what your business goals are. Either you sell a product or service, and your job is to make sure that that product or service gets sold. What I want you to think about for our first exercise is why use marketing? Maybe you've got a website and you want people to buy products from your website. Maybe you want to be known as a thought leader in the community, and long term, you could be used for consulting or speaking. Maybe you got a local business and you want to attract customers in your business, so it should be pretty clear. Why use your marking for the first exercise? I want you to just write down what your key business goal in your notepaper. I want you to put down business goal and what your objective is. Do you want people to go to your website to buy a product? Do you want to be an influencer. Are you a local business? And you want more customers? Or maybe you run a blow garden lined side and your objective is to get traffic to your website so that you can get and revenue. So think about what is the actual task where you get money. So just take 30 seconds to write down what you keep. Business Goal. What's your objective? Why did your business exist? - The thing that our customers paying for is not always the thing that we're providing. So a really easy way to explain this is hair Dresser is getting paid to cut here or style hair. Either way, the service that providing is cutting and styling. The customer, however, is paying to feel a little bit special. They're paying to feel pampered. They're paying for new looking to feel rejuvenated, to feel inspired. One of the reasons is really important for our business. To try and channel the customer is because if we understand the motivation for buying from us, we can help provide a service which meets that. So, for example, if a customer is paying to feel pampered, they might choose the hairdresser that serves them coffee as well in this next exercise. The things I want you to do is to try and challenge your customer and the thoughts and feelings that they're having when their purchasing your product on what helps them make that decision in this exercise, what are what do you think about is a problem your business is solving. So let's look at another example of coffee shop front so people have food and coffee at home. Why would they go outside and pay more for these products? That's because the coffee shop is selling things that are intangible right there selling. Maybe they're selling expertise with the food. Maybe it's ambient, so the opportunity socialize. You know, buying coffee. You're buying the opportunity to unwind. So when you're thinking about your business, have a think about what problem you're businesses solving in terms of emotion. Are people buying expertise from you, other by and experience to can't get at home? Maybe the buying people or a community. It could be that you're saving desire or creating assurance and making people feel confident. Maybe it's an escape. Maybe it's an opportunity for them to become better people on the people that I always wanted to be all but the hairdresser example. Maybe they're paying to be pampered. So think about the problem that your business is solving in terms off people's desires. If you're not sure how to end this question, one of the ways to frame is, Can someone do this at home? And if they can't, why or can anyone do it? Can my mom do this for me? And if he enter is no, then that's probably the reason. And the thing that you're solving think about what is the difference that you're providing that someone can't just do at home. So I'll give you 30 seconds and then we'll move on. - So let's recap the business goals. So you've written down your key business objective in terms of the thing that you were selling, and you've written down why your customer needs your pork. So the intangible aspects off, why, actually, is this product really important to them? So this is the foundation for the business goals is part of our social media pillars. If you wanted to get into more detail around, it's kind of thing that business model canvas could also be a really useful tool to help you really drill down to understand why a business exists on what your customers get out of it, 5. Your Business Community: the next pillar off the social media strategy were running through is community. Social Media is about building trust and building in community and building a relationship with your customers, which is the same as in business, right? Like are return customers there because they're like us and they trust us and the same thing with social media. What you're doing is creating an environment for people to see you and engage with you online. Unlike your business where you might see your customers and your clients every day. In social media, you can always see the people who are lacking your page or engaging with it. That means it's even more important to understand your audience because then you can create crust with them and they'll engage with you. The first thing I want you to think about in terms of community is who are you targeting he to actually want to use your services and maybe even think about who's bought your products in the past and what kind of people need the problem you identified, solved in terms of finding out who targeting it could be really important to do research that might be doing a survey of your customers, or maybe even your friends who are potential customers, or looking at things like your Facebook data to understand who like your page already. So even if you don't know who your audience is already there heaps of approaches you can use to find out more about, um, for our first exercise are willing to think about the demographics of your business broadly in terms of hillier targeting, Think about age, gender, location, everything about the job and maybe the financial situation. Do they know own a lot, or do they own a lot? Think about the key features that make them your customer. Sometimes this can be really click up if you're working for a fashion magazine, maybe audiences women aged 25 to 35 to live in the city and maybe they work in sales. Have a think about who your business is targeting. If you're not sure how you can answer this, think about maybe a couple of customers you've had in the past, or maybe how they relate to this. If you're having trouble thinking about who your business is targeting, maybe consider who your business isn't targeting. Maybe go through each aspect and consider who it's not for so if age maybe think. OK, does this Is this four teenagers or people aged 20 to 30 30 to 40 40 to 50 or 50 to 60 maybe then circle. Okay, so my product is not going to abort pain on anyone under the age of 18 or anyone over the age of 60. Then you got a good window there of understanding the age to the same thing with gender. Is there a difference in terms of whom up by a product and location, it could be something broad, like regional, rural or urban. Or maybe, you know, it's a suburb. You know that there are people in a different suburb of Sydney. They're not gonna buy it. And, of course, consider financial situation or job. It could be that you know that your product is targeting a certain demographic. Think about whether those factors take play into who your business is talking just to keep you on your toes. I've got another exercise right after that one. What I wanted to do now is to explained on this customers, I wouldn't you think about the whole beans, the interest that personality type their dreams in terms of their hobbies, their interests. Maybe you could think about things like what books they read. The favorite TV shows didn't have sports. What sports their love to the go to star bark. So where do they have a coffee in the morning? Who were the favorite? Celebrities think about the things that engage them in terms of their dreams. You might have a really straightforward business, so it could be something like, You work for a travel company and you know that your customers that want to travel the world, But maybe it's not so straightforward. Maybe your customers want to have a family and raise a strong family. Maybe they want to have a successful career. Some of the debate harder to tell our customers dreams, but give it a go. See what you can come up with in terms of what motivates them. I'm starting the clock, and they've got 30 seconds to write down your ideas. - What you've done now is written down a really clear idea of your customer. So you've got an idea off who they are in terms of the demographics, but also some of things that interest them 6. Social Channel Demographics: after the previous exercise, you've now got a really clear idea or who your target audiences in terms of demographics. So it's really important to understand which social networks, those demographics Iran anecdotally, we know different demographics are on different social networks. You know that your teenage cousin is on Snapchat and your business savvy young call is unlinked in. So we know in our day to day lives that different social networks attract different demographics. So what you now need to think about is making sure that your business is on the right social network that serves the demographic that you're targeting. This is the same as any kind of media and any kind of advertising, right? You're not going to go down to Bondi Beach and hand out flyers for the World of Warcraft convention. So you need to make sure that where you're putting your promotions is in the right place for your audience. This is a chart off social media demographics. The green you can see is 18 to 29. Yellow is people aged 30 to 49 50 to 64 is blue, and 65 plus is red. So what, you can really clearly see See here is that people under the age of 30 and we're likely to be on Snapchat and Instagram. If you're targeting people 30 to 49 they're more likely to be on Twitter, LinkedIn, some of instagram, some of Pinterest and, of course, Facebook. If you're looking for demographic 50 to 64 Lichten is a great place to find them. So his Facebook. And if you're targeting 65 plus Facebook is a really solar place to find the audience. If you're targeting based on gender, you find things like Pinterest is a great source for females as well as instagram and Snapchat, and we can also look at income levels. If you know your customers are quite thrifty, you might wanna have a look at Facebook as your core marketing channel if you're targeting CEOs or executives who rake in the cash target linked in because that's where those people are. And of course, this data doesn't stand in isolation. Weaken. See things like people on Snapchat and Instagram. They earn less money, and that's not because exclusively that people in those channels, unless money, is because generally the younger and if you're under the age of 18 years. I have a job yet, so it's important to keep in mind the context of some of this data. So this data can be really useful in terms of understanding where your customers are. If you're selling one direction, merchandise don't even bother with Linked in If you're selling tax advice, don't go on snapshot. So keep in mind that you don't actually need to be on every single social network you need to be on the one that suits the demographic that you're looking for in your business. If that child was a bit much and you're still not sure which social network you should target, check out my website. I've got a quiz there so that you can get an idea of which audience you should be looking at based on demographics. For some people, demographics like age are not so important. You might be looking for a personality type. For example, you might be looking for artists so creatives, which can spend any demographic due to that you might want to think about social networks of it more in terms off industry. I would have chart here, which gives him recommendations on how you can use social media by industry based on how people might engage with it, because each social network also has a culture that means that the people it attracts is quite different in terms of how they behave. So if you're looking to get an understanding off which types of people you're after, the culture can be the thing that actually makes that determination rather than the demographics. So, for example, if you're in art or design something like Instagram G troop, Pinterest or Facebook might be where you wanna talk about your customers. So, for example, we know that Instagram and Pinterest are very visually focused, and that's where a lot of creatives go to share their work. So if you're looking for the art and design community, have a look at Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest and Facebook. Do the culture of Twitter. If you're targeting consultants or executives, you might find that's a bit of place to target than other platforms. You also might find linked in using a blawg like WordPress or medium and Facebook to target them. If you're in retail or hospitality, things like Instagram and Facebook are great starting point. So if you're tradesmen or in the services industry, and you don't rely on repeat customers in the same ways other businesses. What you might find is it more important to look at. The social networks would rely on referrals and reviews. So making sure your Google search or Google maps business listening is up to date and review science like true local or yelp. If there are reviews on there, make sure that they're up to scratch and that you're keeping on top of them in terms off, making sure that there are good reviews. And if there's not, try and address it with that customer now. This is not set in stone in terms of industry, but this is the gardens in terms of keeping in mind the culture of your channels in terms off your business. What I want you to do now is to spend 30 seconds riding down the channels that best suit the people who are trying to target. I want you to write down one primary social channel and then to secondary social channels. That's because I want you to consider where you're spending your time and effort. You don't need to be across everything you don't need to update everything every day. Haven't focus so that you could be more strategic about your time and energy. You've got 30 seconds to write down where your business is best suited, whether it's Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest have a think about it based on what we've gone through and write it down. - So now you know which social networks your customers are on and you know where to spend your time and energy. And don't forget this data does change over time. So there's a social network that is rapidly growing or changing, having looked at the demographics and see if your target audience is there a great place to check that out is the Pew Internet report and also the sense of social report. So keep up to date with the latest demographic data. And when a new social network comes out, you don't need to jump over immediately, have a look at the demographics that are on their first and then make an informed decision as to whether it's best for your business. And next up we're gonna be talking about the culture of your business 7. Your Business Culture: culture is the final pillar in a social media strategy. Your culture are your business values embodied, and people buy from people who have similar values to them. So your social media strategy must have your culture coming through so that people understand where your business is coming from. When you see an ad for Coke on TV, how often is Coca Cola say only a dollar 95? I'm gonna say never, And that's because Coca Cola aren't selling based on price. The selling based on brand the selling based on being cool your culture is part of your brand brand is the feeling your customers get when I think about your product. Cover. Colder is a really powerful brand in the way that it puts emotions at the forefront of its product. Think about the feelings associated with Coca Cola or with Apple or with uber thes brands, all really powerful in terms of the emotions day of work and your business conduce this too . So you're culture is the ideas and experiences around your brand. Let's talk about your business culture when you set up a business plan. Sometimes culture is not diverse in that comes to mind. And if you're a sole trader, maybe he never even realized you had a business culture. But every business does. It has thes core values, which make the business unique. So when we're thinking about culture, we want to think about what do you want for your business? How do you want people to see your company? And what do you want people to feel when they interact with your company for the next exercise? I've got a task for you, which comes from big brand systems, and it's a way of thinking about your business in terms off the opposites and where it fits on a scale. None of these things are native terms. Just businesses sit on the scale in different ways. For example, if you're trying to create an accessible language service like Jewel Linger, being corporate professional wouldn't suit their brand or imagine a law firm. They probably don't want to come across this spontaneous, so high energy. They want to be trusted right down. We're business sits on those scales, and hopefully it'll help you see your business in a way that maybe you haven't thought about before. Right down on each of these comparative terms. Which one? Your business most closely aligns is your business personal and friendly corporate. Is it spontaneous and high energy? Okay for thinking and planning. Is it modern, high tech or traditional and classic? Are you cutting edge? Are you established? Are you fun? Are serious? Are you accessible to all or upscale? One of the other ways to find out who we are is to think about who we're not. So what I want you to for the next exercise is to just visualize one of your competitors or the nearest thing to a competitive you've got and put them in your mind when you're doing the next exercise. What I want to do is think about five words that describe your business. So I'll give you three seconds to complex five things that really describe the heart of your business. - So , through this exercise, hopefully you've seen the business through a new lens. And the way that contributes might see, you know, you'd like contributes to see, Maybe you didn't realize your business was actually spontaneous and fun. Maybe you didn't realize that what important your business is being trusted. So understanding the values that are important to your business means you can reflect this in your marketing. So now you've with the core elements that you need for your social media strategy. You've got your key business goals and why you marketing using social media and what's your objective of marketing? You've identified your customer and what's important to them and a little bit about the dreams. You got a really solid idea about your customer and the community you wanna build with that customer and about your culture and your business values that you want to come through your marketing. You've also identified what social media platform best suits your business. Maybe it's Facebook. Maybe it's linked in. Maybe you want to try INSTAGRAM. You now have all the key elements to feeling your social media strategy template. So let's have a look at it again. You can now say, using the platform, whether it's Facebook, Twitter, instagram, I'll get the attention and interest off the audience. So maybe you know it's females aged 30 to 35. You're gonna be using content which looks at your business values, so whether that's being innovative or fun or accessible or educational, and you're gonna convert your customers with engaging content around your parks, and you've got your long term goal, which might be converting customers to your website, getting people to find out about your coffee shop. Maybe it's building your reputation online, so now you have an understanding of the key elements that make a social media strategy to bring it all together. Next up will turn this high level social media strategy into tactics, and you find out how you can turn that in due content. I'll see you in the next lecture. 8. Combining the Elements: from the first half of the course, you know, have a really strong understanding off the building blocks of a social media strategy. The next step is to turn this strategy into tactics. To do that, we need to have a look back at a social media pills and build off those. Let's get into it. Well, look again, that three social media strategy pillars. We've got our culture, our community and our business goals. So gonna turn these into tactics. How do we do that For culture? This is creating content, which celebrates the culture of your business and create terrible experiences for community . It's creating content that acknowledges your customers and the way they engage with your business and new business goals is making your skills, services or expertise accessible and shareable. Let's have a quick look good example of these for culture. A local cafe celebrates one of the really strong aspects of their business culture, which is the playful sign board. So they're sharing that with their community online in terms of community. This is a gym that headed to the top of the mountain and sought sunrise at dawn and the sharing their selfie of that experience, such about sharing the way the community interacts with the business, and this Final one in terms of business goals is a straight up advertisement. But it's accessible. They're promoting a life drawing class, and the way they're doing that is through sharing an example off previous paintings from the class. So you can see that each of these examples are really different. But it's quite clear that purpose off each of these posts. When we think back to the ADA sales filed that we spoke about earlier, remember that not every Post needs to be about sales, and it's because his other posts have another purpose. And they're about sharing the values and culture off your business to build trust before we head to the next section, where we talk about turning your strategy into tactics and creating content. I got a quick exercise for you. What I want you to do for this exercise is have a look and see if you can see examples of this in the real world. Have a look at the pages. Do you like on Facebook? Maybe it's Orioles. Maybe it's Netflix local coffee shop. Your competitors have a looking to see if you can find examples in the real world off people using culture, community and business goals in terms of filling out their content. Maybe you'll say some great examples and you get some great ideas. Maybe you Susan Page is really aren't up to scratch, and they're not using the content to the greatest ability. But what I want you to do is think critically about these pages and the content. What are they posting? Why they're posting it. I'll see you back here in a minute and will run through creating content. I'll see you soon. 9. Content Types: in this lecture. Before we look at turning your content strategy into tactics, we need to get an understanding on the different content types that are available. So let's run through content creation and what options you've got in terms of content types . Most social platforms allow for a variety of content types. This includes text, photos, videos and links. These examples are all from Facebook, but you can equally use them on Twitter on Instagram. You can also post photos and videos. It's important to understand the different content types that are available so that when you're coming up with your content ideas, you're keeping in mind all the different media types that are available. One of the things to keep in mind is that Facebook's algorithm favors different types of content. So, for example, plain text or video is very effective at the moment. In terms of reach, if you post just a photo or just a link, it'll be served to fewer people. This does change over time, so it's worth looking at your Facebook Page analytics and having a look at seeing which media type is most effective for your business. Make sure you use a wide variety of content to keep your friends engaged over time and keep them interested. Just posting the same kind of content will be quite monotonous, So mix it up, throwing a photo throwing a video. Keep the audience engaged by mixing up the content types they're using. The next thing to keep in mind is presenting content. Best practiced dictates that you want to keep your ideas simple in terms of text. Just use one concept per post. I'd also recommend keeping it shorter than a paragraph if you can keep your language in turn with your brand. If you're targeting teens, feel free to use slang and emojis. But if you're targeting and corporate audience, make sure your language is in line with their expectations. A final tip is to make sure that your image is size to suit the platform you're on on Facebook or Twitter. If you've got a very long or very tall image, it will be hard to see, especially on mobile devices. Keep in mind that if your images to be your audience won't be able to see it, especially if it's something like a flyer and is a lot of detail and texting in terms off tools and resources to help you make some really beautiful content. There are plenty of free tools out there. If you're looking at photos, you can use Creative Commons stock photos to give your social media lots of color and variety. If you want to add some color to social media profiles, you stock photos. And I know they've got a bad rap, but they're not as bad as they used to be. There are plenty of independent photography's providing their work for free under a Creative Commons license, which means that anyone can use it. Picks. Obey is a great site which aggregate many independent photographers so you can find some really beautiful content there in terms of image editing. If you can't afford Photoshopped cry, pick slur dot com. It's a Web service that has all the functionality of photo shop, but it's based on the Web in terms of graphic design. The side that you need to bookmark is Canada dot com. It's a website which has beautiful templates to help you design your social media content. Whether it's a Facebook update, a cover image or maybe it's a PowerPoint presentation, it's got a wide variety of templates, fonts and images you can use to create beautiful content and, of course, video. There are plenty of options these days. Another option is YouTubed inbuilt video editor. You can upload video files and pictures and edit them together right there in YouTube. Sharing content would relate to the industry of your business is a really strong way. You can create a culture around your business where they're sharing the latest news. The latest trends or interesting, how to articles Content can be a really strong way of engaging your audience. You've got a heap of options in terms of finding content, which you can then serve on your social media pages. One of the other things to keep in mind when you're sharing other people's content is about attribution. If you're sharing links to other people's content like articles because it's direct, click through your already attributing the author. If you're sharing photos on INSTAGRAM, post, its best practice to attribute where you got the image from, you're probably already subscribed to a lot of these services already. It's about changing your perspective now and making sure you're thinking about this content in terms of sharing and from your business page before we head into the next exercise. I want to remind you what we spoke about right at the beginning of the course, and that was come into this course with the approach of a blue sky and a fresh perspective . The next exercise is a creativity warmer, and I want you to come into it with a with a playful approach. So what I wanted to do is just kind of loosen up, stretch your shoulders and get ready to be really playful and creative, because the second half of this course is about being creative and hands on. So I want you to just spend a minute just to breathe in and out and get ready to put yourself in a creative space. So let's do the next exercise. The next exercise might look a little bit odd from first sight, but it is a divergent thinking exercise, which means it's an exercise to help make you more creative. The idea is that it helped you think off new ways and new solutions to things, which means that you are a little bit more creative when we head to our next section. The idea is that you spend 60 seconds riding down alternate uses for an object and the object working me writing some ideas down for is a shoe, for example. It could be a baseball bat, so there are two ways you can do this exercise. You can either right on a bit of paper at home and not show anybody, or you can head to the website of got listed at the bottom of the slide. If you hear to the link at the bottom of the presentation, you'll be taken to a form we can fill in your ideas. From there. It submitted to the world and people can see your ideas, and you can see other people's ideas. Just a bit of a fun way to get some new ideas and warm up creatively. So the exercises that you've got 60 seconds to come up with his many uses for a shoe as possible so your time starts now 10. Your Business Posts: Now it's time to turn your strategy into tactics. You remember that earlier we discussed the three pillars culture, community and business goals on Mr An example of how each one worked. Now what we're gonna do is look at a few more examples of each one and then doing exercise when you turn your business goals, your culture and your community into posts. First up, we're going to look at business goals, and this is looking at making your skills, your services or your expertise accessible and terrible. I pulled together a few examples from across the Web, looking at different kinds of businesses so you can get some ideas on how people might share their skills and expertise as a business or business owner. On the very top of the page, we can see a vegan restaurant highlighting its wares with a picture as well as their opening and closing times. In the bottom corner, we've got a gym which is highlighting its class times, but the really visually engaging and clean image next to that broken accounting app, which is highlighting and you filter, which has been released as part of their software in the far corner We've got a local cafe that does life drawing classes in the venue, and in that post you can see that it's showing off some of the work from a previous student off the class and, of course, this process highlighting the time and address. A lot of these posts share really specific details to increase conversion, which is why they're looking at business goals. You can see the opening time of the cafe, the time of the boxing class and the address off the art class so you can see that these really highlight converting people and in terms of sharing their product or the service. In the very top of this page, we can see a hairdresser that's posted a before and after picture. One of the things that it does well is that it highlights the specific hairdresser who did that color. In the bottom corner, we can see the accounting app that's highlighting a podcast with business advice. What this is doing is positioning itself as a thought leader in the industry, showing small businesses that it knows about the problems that they're facing in the middle again. We've got a beautiful shot of a burger again is part of the vegan restaurant and has the opening. I was clearly stated on the end. We've got the gym again. While the picture is a motivational post in the copy, we can see the cold Action is saying Come and book in a free appointment with a personal trainer. He's the number call. The call to action is really clear. Each of these sure skill and expertise in a different way, whether it's a podcast showing that they understand the needs of business owners or showing off before and after, or a direct call to action of saying, booking now for your free appointment. These posts all show different ways of showing off expertise based on different industries . Pull out your pen and paper again. We've got another exercise. What I'd like you to do is to spend 30 seconds writing down your three best selling products, all three services that you provide now that you've got your three products or services on. When you extend that, what I want you to do is how to think about how you can promote those in an engaging way on social media. Think about whether it's Facebook, instagram or a video. Don't be limited in this exercise about thinking about whether you have the technical capability to do it or whether you have a photographer or whatever. I want to think Blue Sky. I think I can create a podcast about this or I can create a video syriza about this. Be really creative. I think Blue Sky because this about coming up with ideas for this content. There aren't many opportunities in life to come up with just pure creative ideas. There are a lot of opportunities to try and scale back those ideas and make them more realistic. So this is the opportunity to be creative, to make the most of it and think big. 11. Your Community Posts: the next pillow. We're gonna look at these community, and this is looking at how we're gonna acknowledge your customers as they exist now and have engaged with your business early in the course. You identifying the core audience that your business is targeting. I want you to keep those people in mind when you're looking through this content to give you ideas. But how you can engage those people? Let's have a look at these examples of how other businesses engage their local community in the bottom left hand corner. There's a local art festival, which is highlighting one of the curators and the tour that they're providing in their local area. In the bottom right hand corner, you can see the hairdresser is back again, and this time they're showing off their client's hair. Part of why the cigarette tactic for this hairdresser is because they're showing off their customers. Thes customers love the hair dresser. They want to go there and be seen there, so this is a great way to provide that in a social setting. Right in the middle, we can see a cafe highlighting and plate of its food, and first glance, you might say, What does that got to do with community? Well, what they've done is they've actually shared a picture from someone's INSTAGRAM account. They've said Thanks so much. Awesome snap from this instagram er, one really great way to acknowledge community is by sharing the content that they create about your business. Not only does the tag acknowledge that user, but I might get some a few more followers as well. It's a really lovely way to acknowledge your local community by sharing their content and tagging them. We'll get a few more examples here as well. In the bottom left hand corner, we can see there's a gym that hunted off the mountain at dawn and they're sharing a selfie off the entire group that went up there. That's a beautiful way of acknowledging the people that were there and also tonight, spittle promotion, showing the kinds of real world community they have there, right in the middle, where gotta post from the cafe we saw earlier in this post. They're talking about an upcoming night where local asylum seekers a sharing food and cuisine from their local country to this, the great post, which is highlighting the local community and giving it a face. On the end, we can see the accounting software highlighting one of the local retailers that uses their software. It might be short of their products, but showcasing a member off their community right down the bottom, we can see a local recipe side that's engaging into audience in a different way. It's posting on a Sunday afternoon What's baking your oven. Knowing the culture of that community is to get into the kitchen and bake on a weekend that asking their community to share their thoughts and experiences of what they're doing on the weekend. So that again, I really love the way to engage the community in a different way. So it's really about understanding who your audience is, understanding them, understand their dreams and desires, thinking about how you can help them achieve their goals while your business can achieve your goals at the same time. So for this exercise, what I wanted to do is think about your customers. Think about three discussions. Your customers or clients would love to get involved in about your industry. Maybe it's a coffee short. Or maybe it's a Friday afternoon and you've gone down to the pub and you're having a chat with your customers. What kinds of things that they want to know about your industry. What would you chat about? What are the things that they really fascinated by and really interested in? Off give you 30 seconds to write down some ideas. - Now you got those ideas in mind. What I wanted to have a think about is how to turn this into social major engagements. So what you thought about here is put stuff in my customers really passion about to do with my business? How can I turn that into content? So I want you to come up with again. Think blue sky three ideas, maybe post photos, videos, images, podcasts, anything which engages people around those topics that you'd come up with, so I'll give you 30 seconds. 12. Your Culture Posts: and final Pillot is culture, and this is looking at those key elements that are unique to your business and the values of business holds. You'll remember earlier you looked at your business on a matrix, looking at things like whether it was innovative or traditional. And he also came up with some words which you felt described your business and came to really core of your business values and the things your business finds important. What this pillar is about is bringing out those values and turning them into culture, so creating a tangible representation off those values. As I mentioned earlier, part of my values of really important to share is because people like to buy from people they trust to have similar values to them. So if you share your social media content highlighting the things that you find important, they'll be more likely to trust you. Because of that, While these posts and not converting people into customers, what they are doing is showing a little bit of heart and soul behind business. Let's have a look at some of the examples that we've got here from other businesses posting about their culture, run up the top. What would a local food brand who's celebrating the fun of food? They've got a very hungry caterpillar cut off kiwi fruit and pineapple, and it's quite playful. That post isn't highlighting any of their food. What it's doing is saying, You know what? Food is fun and we love. The food is playful and it's something to celebrate in the bottom right hand corner. We've got the cafe who was highlighting their job board and then highlighting the kind of joke that got on there and the kind of playful community that were going on around loving coffee. This is a great post because it also is building in community. So it's tagging the Instagram user who took that photo in the bottom left hand corner. The local art festival is highlighting an instagram competition. It knows it's got a strong photography community, so it's got on Instagram come running, and it is reminding everyone, hey last say to get in wind five grand in the top left hand corner is a really great engagement from a local bookstore. It seemed that a local publication has created a quiz on How well do you remember Pride and Prejudice they've said Great. This is what our audience loves and have shed that The thing that I really love about this post is that they're not afraid to link to somebody else's content because it's an opportunity to engage the audience and run something they're passionate about. In the bottom left hand corner in the bottom left hand corner. We'll get a post from an advertising agency, and this one's from linked in. It's a bit of a cheeky post saying Have taking a selfie can increase your life expectancy so it's kind of a cute chick. You look a technology and culture, but it's also a little bit playful, a swell in the bottom right hand corner. Whether the consultant who was shared a quote from Stephen Hawking good here, this Post is to share the motivational quotes and thoughtful inspired her and that she wants to inspire her community with. So what you can see from these examples is that culture could be represented in a whole variety of ways. It's about thinking about things like your community and the things that passion about and your values, and it's drawing those together to come up with content that engages them fund content that really engages you on an emotional level, and that's the kind of really so that content that you want to be sharing with your community. What I'd like you to do now is to find the culture words that you wrote about your business earlier and what you write them down again, maybe on a new bit of paper. But write them down from scratch. Now. I wanted to come up with three ideas of how you can create content around this. Maybe you're finding a quiz from online. Maybe it's a photo. Maybe it's a quote. Maybe it's a funny news article. Think about what you're doing to share these cultural values with your community. I'll give you 30 seconds to come up with some ideas. 13. Measuring Success: The final thing that we need to keep in mind with our social media strategy is look at how we're going to measure out success. We already spoke about our business goals earlier on in the course, and what we can do now is look at how we can apply metrics to our social media activities to see if we've been successful in meeting our business goals. Like all business activities and all marketing activities, this commune measured to see if it's been successful. One of the things I would invite you to do when we're talking about metrics of your social media channels is not to get looting to looking at your social media followers as the metric to look at to determine your success. While looking at overall followers for an account can be useful for measuring brand health , what it doesn't tell you is whether it's meeting your business goals. There are other metrics that we can look at to see if your meeting those business goals for our next exercise. What will be looking at is your business goals, and we'll be looking at these business goals in a new way because thes could be aligned with metrics so that you can measure your success in a really tangible way. I would like you to do is tow. Have a look at the list on the screen and rank from 1 to 4. How important each of those goals are to your business. Have a think about whether it's important that people hear about your brand. Maybe you're just starting out. How important is it to have people engaging with your business or building trust? Maybe you're a personality, and you want to create a new set of long term clients. If you are ad based business, you might find people visiting your website is most important. And if you're selling production line, you might find people buying products from your website or booking online as the most important thing that you want to be looking at. Once again, I'm gonna give you 30 seconds to rank those business goals. - It can be really easy in business to feel like we have a little golden were being tourney in different places. So why I got you to rank those goals was because you can then see which metrics are most important for your business and which ones you should be focusing on when you're looking at measuring your success as you're gonna see from this green. Each of those business goals correlates with him. Metric. These metrics can be tangibly measured to see whether your social media activities have been successful or not. If your focus is on people hearing about your brand, you want to be focusing on metrics around reach. If you want people to be interacting with your brand or you're building a community and building crust, that engagement is what you want to be looking at. People visiting your website, you wanna be looking at click throughs and people buying Poor ox is looking at convergence . So what I want you to have a think about now is which metric are you focusing on? You might have a primary metric and a secondary metric, but it is important to keep in mind the one that actually achieves your business goals. And, as I said, don't get distracted with the big numbers around full of numbers because they're nice and shiny. But I don't look at whether they're achieving your business goals. The first thing we're going to be looking at is how to measure reach as a case study will have a look at Facebook and how to measure reach using Facebook. But both Twitter and Instagram have analytics, so you can use the same model using those platforms to measure reach. The first thing you need to do is go to your analytics section. From there you need to export your diner, and this will usually download in the next cell document. When you're downloading your data, make sure you look at the post little data, not the page little data, because the post level data will look at your individual posts with your page data will be looking at your overall page likes. And as I've already said, that isn't the best metric to measure your success. Once you've downloaded your Excel document, what you need to do is have a look and find the column that talks about reach simply put a filter on the top and then rank that data based on highest to lowest. From there, you can see which post have been most effective in terms of reach, which ones have been least effective. Have a look at those posts and have a look and see what patents you confined. Other talking about certain topics are there featuring certain themes or certain words. Have a look and see what you can find around the patterns so that you can determine what's most effective for your social media channels. Once you found a patent, then you can create more content, which is Micah. If the key metric you're looking at was engagement, you need to the same thing where you export your posts from your analytics section and then rank the data. Now engagement is a little bit of a buzzword. I'll be honest. But what it's talking about is how many people have been engaging with your social media posts and engagement could cover a whole bunch of things. It could be someone liking your posts, someone commenting on your posts or sharing. If you're on Twitter, it could also mean a retweet. So it's about people engaging with your content. If you are looking at different social networks, you might find more effective to look at things like retweets, for example on Twitter. But Facebook does have a column which is directly for engagement, so have a look and see which metric makes the most sense for what you're measuring. But in the Angelo here, how people interacting with my business. If what you were looking at was traffic to your site, then you wanna have a look at click furs. So against the same process, we can export your daughter and see which posts have been clicked on. It can sometimes be tricky where some datasets show you if someone has clicked anywhere on the post, which obviously isn't the same someone clicking through to your site. So make sure you're looking at the donna around people clicking through to your side. You can export your data from your analytics section in your social network sites such as Facebook. Alternatively, you could use your analytics software like Google Analytics to do this as well. What you would do there is measure your traffic based on source and look for things like people coming from Facebook or Twitter. In some cases, you might prefer to just measure this using your website analytics rather than Facebook analytics, because your website analytics will be a lot more accurate in terms off how it's measuring where people are coming from. When you're looking at conversion, this is looking at whether someone has bought something on your website, whether it's made a booking or purchased a product while you can use your social media donna to get indication off this, using the click throughs data, it's probably going to be more effective if you look at your website analytics data, such as using something like Google Analytics goals, which can show you your sales final and see where people are coming from, what that the sources and whether those people are actually perching your products so you can see where your marketing efforts most effective. The next thing we're gonna be looking at is just a quick overview off different tools you can use to measure this success. As I mentioned earlier, Social media is a huge space. So when we're looking at tools to measure, it's useful to get an understanding off the entire social media landscape. We can quite easily be looking at paid media such as Facebook ads that we buy. We could be looking at owned media, which is things like the social media channels that we run. Or it could be looking at owned media, which is things like the logos your reviews are review sites that other people make. If you're looking at paid media in order to determine your success, you were looking at things like your Facebook ads, and you'll be looking at things like your business manager for ads and seeing your analytics within that to know in order to see if your ad spend has been effective. You were looking at things like cost per click to determine the success of that. We're already running through your hair. You can look at your own media's. That's things like your Facebook or Twitter analytics as well as your Google analytics in order to see what traffic has come from. If you're looking at owned media, this is looking at blog's or conversations people have heart had online about your brand. You might want to use a few tools to see how people are talking about your business externally, outside of the channels you run, you might use Google alerts for something like that, or tall like if this. Then that was a p a dot com, which can be used to search for keywords and then connects them to something like Google documents. So you can see how much conversation is happening online about you all. You might want to invest in some social media listening or social media monitoring software . And Nuvi is one brand, which does that. There are plenty of other brands out there, but it's one place that you can start getting an idea of what the options are. So now you should have an idea of what you need to keep in mind when you're measuring the success of your social media channels. 14. Your Next Steps: So now we have come up with ideas for each of our three pillars. We've looked at our business goals. While we're marketing, we've looked at community and who you're targeting, where looked a culture and how you want people to feel with your business values at its coal. They've come up with the platforms that you think are best suited for your business and the best parties. If you've been following along and come up with social media posts for each of those ideas , you put enough for a week or two or three of content, so you're ready to get started with your new strategy. Already today we've looked at what is social media marketing, and what is the social media strategy we looked at? How you can identify your business goals and your culture, how to find your customer needs in the target market. We have looked at which social networks suit your business goals, not jumping on any network that comes up seeing if the demographic suit your business using the social media strategy template you've come up with, Ah, high level strategy for your business and you've come up with nine posts to execute that strategy. Already in terms of next steps, you are ready to schedule that content you gotta created. It follows your business goals. You got a strategy in place. So now it's time to start executing. Choose your favorite post, and I will need a post one now from your business page, then schedule another one for tomorrow. The final thing I need to do is to set aside time each week to think about new content. With this in mind, maybe you've got other people who also work in your social media channels. Get them engaged thinking about your business in this way. Thank you so much for taking the calls, but now I'll come together, has come to a close. But find now, you should feel cooperative with your social media strategy you designed. The strategy is right for your business. If you enjoy these calls, please Lee. It means it up with people who have taken schools. Know that this is a course that is for that time and course ego. Other friends in business Do you think we'll find this old school if you're still that any of the little legal questions feel free to put them in the comments sections will send me a message on 12. Don't answer as soon as I can. And don't forget, I put plenty of other courses. If you'd like to learn more about social media, digital media, then come and join me on one of my other courses. I Disease Inc. Another course.