Transcripts
1. Introduction: Thank you for checking
out this course in how to create a
social media strategy that will work for your
brand and get you noticed. I'm Cam and the marketing
lead here at Hitmarker. We're a multi award-winning
job platform with high engagement followings across multiple
social platforms. We bought these all
from scratch in our four years of operation. In this course we've distilled the key learnings that we've
picked up along the way. We've also included the
lessons that our team has learned from working
outside of our company, meaning you'll get
a full scope of how you can approach social
media as a brand. We've written this course,
assuming that you already have a basic understanding of
how to use social media, even if it's just on a personal level and a focus
instead on showing you how you can create an effective
social media strategy to help you achieve
your business goals. Throughout the course, you'll
be coached on how to create a social media strategy
document from scratch. You can do this for your
own personal brand, the company you work for, or even for a made up company just for the purposes
of this course. We provided a template document for you to use if you wish, which can be found
in the projects and resources tab below the course. But if you prefer, you can
absolutely create your own. We've structured the
course into easy-to-digest individual lessons to
help you stay focused. We encourage you to complete the course in the
intended order. Throughout the lessons,
we will help you identify the platforms you
should be prioritizing, how to set realistic goals that align with your business needs, discuss the tools that can
help you achieve these goals, and finally, how to create and use compelling content
to drive growth. These lessons will
not only help you define an initial
social media strategy, but also help you to
adapt and adjust in the future as trends or indeed your
business needs change. Let's jump into the
first lesson and discuss one effective social
media strategy involves.
2. Defining a social media strategy: Now more than ever, the social media
marketing landscape is extremely varied and
extremely competitive. More and more companies
are recognizing the value of a strong social media
presence for their brand, so your why's are
thinking the same. If you want to build a
social media presence that amplifiers
your brand's goals, you need to find a strategy that first aligns with those goals. To achieve this, there are a few key steps you need to
go through to ensure that your strategy is right and that social media presence is engaging and impactful.
Don't panic though. We're going to take
you through each one of these step-by-step. First, you need to research. Specifically, you need to
research your target audience, find out what your
key demographic is, where they're
hanging out online, and use this
information to decide which social networks
you'll focus on. You also going to need
to set some goals, realistic targets
that make sense, and add real value
to your business. With some realistic
goals in mind, you'll need to identify
the key metrics and KPIs, you will need to track
in order to measure your progress and keep you
focused on your mission. One of the most important
things that you'll need to work on is
a content plan. Without exciting,
engaging content, your social media presence
would lack impact. Your content plan needs to
be creative and robust. The good news is, we're
going to explain each of these steps in more detail in subsequent lessons
in this course. Keep watching if
you want to create the strongest social
media strategy possible.
3. Which social media platforms should you focus on?: At the time of
recording this course, there are no fewer than six
major social media networks that are used by thousands
of brands around the world. As well as a bunch of other platforms that brands and certain industries lean on, such as Pinterest,
Snapchat, and Reddit. One of the early decisions
you'll need to make is which of these platforms
you're going to focus on. As unless you have a large
team or a huge budget, it's tough to be effective
across all of them. Whether one or two-person
social media team would suggest that you focus on two or three
primary platforms and build up your brand
awareness on this. The main six
platforms that we'll cover in this course,
are Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn,
YouTube, and TikTok. Over the next six lessons, we'll discuss a little bit about the strengths and weaknesses
of each platform, as well as each of their
primary demographics. In order for you to decide which platforms
are right for you, now is the time to identify
the users you want to target through your
course is silence. We're talking about the social
media strategy document is linked below this video
as the course project. Using either the
template document we provided or your own, write down some
notes identifying your key user or
customer demographics, especially age
group, and gender. Then watch the next six lessons. Use your audience research
to identify which of the major six platforms will
work best for your business. When you finish watching
those six lessons, add your priority platforms
to your strategy document.
4. Twitter: In 2022 and beyond, using Twitter for your business
is almost a no-brainer. With over 200
million daily users consuming the short-form content this platform specializes in, that's a pie you almost
certainly want a slice of. Twitter posts are relatively
easy to compose too, and with its status as one
of the most popular places to discuss global
news and events, it's a very popular
business choice. The largest age group for
Twitter users is 25-34 years old with a gender split of 62% males and
38% females. Twitter as a platform
heavily favors visual content, especially
short-form videos, which makes a strong
visual content plan, key to finding success
on the social network. It's important to keep in mind, the content has a very
short lifespan on Twitter, with most posts only lasting
for around 18 minutes. This makes it extremely
important that your Twitter posts be short,
snappy, and compelling. If you think Twitter is the
right platform for you, add it to your social
media strategy document along with why you
think this is. Move on to our next lesson. We'll be discussing Facebook.
5. Facebook: If you're looking for
maximum potential exposure for your business
on social media, Facebook could be an
excellent platform choice. Roughly 2.7 billion
people use Facebook every single month and
according to reports, 2/3 of these users say they visit a business Facebook
page at least once a week. Facebook is a very
versatile platform that makes it easy to engage and communicate with your audience. With the Facebook
groups feature, which is used by over a
billion people each month, building a community hub for your users is easy
and convenient. Although the largest age
group on Facebook is between 25 and 34-years-old, it's worth noting
that in the US, 60% of the
population aged between 57 and 75 had a
Facebook account in 2019. This makes Facebook a
prime place to advertise due to the higher
average disposable income of this demographic. One thing to bear
in mind is that the Facebook algorithm
loves video content. If you can create exciting
and informative and engaging videos to share with your
audience, you're onto a winner. Great content is extremely
shareable on Facebook, and consistently uploading and posting high-quality videos will give you a good chance of seeing considerable growth on
your Facebook page. If it sounds like your business
would thrive on Facebook, get it added to your
strategy document. Come along as we take
a look at Instagram.
6. Instagram: With over a billion active
monthly users who has great value to be found and having a brand
Instagram present. Platform's largest age
group is 25-34 year-olds. It's one of the few major
social networks with a high proportion
of female users with a 57% share. Instagram or Facebook can
work well together with a well-thought-out
content strategy as they both run on
the same ad platform, which enables great
cross-promotion for both brands. Some of Instagram's
useful features include stories which
are great for sharing behind the scenes
posts and I think character and personality
to your brand. There's reels, which have the platform compete
what TikTok and YouTube shorts for short form of video content consumption
and of course, there's brand attach
tag, which can help your brand marketability on Instagram without
feeling too promotional. Instagram users respond less
to the hard sell method and it's keeping your presence authentic and personable
is absolutely key. Keep your image posts and video posts to a
one-to-one aspect ratio and your reels to 1920 by 1080 dimension but
in portrait mode. This will optimize
your posts to look the best they possibly can in
people's home page feed. It's important to use
hashtags on Instagram too, as this can get your
profile highlighted in certain feeds. As long as your posts stand
out amongst the others, then you'll be
hitting new users and hopefully converting
them to followers. Take some time to
think about whether Instagram is a platform, you want to focus your
social media efforts on. If it is add it down to your social media
strategy document. Is your brand are
highly visual one? Do you have a variety
of products to share? It can help you create a
colorful and varied feed? Or your brand sells
physical product? If you answered yes to
any of these questions, Instagram is definitely a
platform for you to consider. Remember, once we've reviewed
all the major platforms, we'll revisit this section of your strategy document so you can add some notes
on how you plan to approach each of the
chosen platforms. In our next lesson, we're going to take
a look at YouTube.
7. YouTube: You may be surprised to see
YouTube in this section of our social media strategy
course. But hear hear out. Not only does YouTube definitely qualify as a social network, but the video showing behemoth
is also considered to be the second largest
search engine on the planet with two
billion monthly users, 62% of whom
login to the platform every single day for an
average of 41 minutes. There was a massive
audience we leveraged here. With the introduction
of YouTube shorts, there's also another
competitor to TikTok in the short form
video content arena. With 15-25 rods being the
largest age group on YouTube, there's plenty of potential for brands to be discovered
on this platform. Currently, however,
only 18% of YouTube users claim to use
website to discover brands. There's a lot of
work to be done as companies try to
strike the balance between entertaining
and advertising to people on this platform. If you have plans
for consistent, high-quality video content, YouTube could be a great
platform to focus on. Make a note on your
strategy document and come with me as we talk about LinkedIn in the next lesson.
8. LinkedIn: If you're interested in reaching a more professional audience, possibly with business-to-business
marketing in mind, LinkedIn could be a
great platform for you, with over 700 million users, and 46-55-year-olds to being
the largest user age group. LinkedIn is one of the
top-rated social networks for lead generation and finding
motivated audience. I don't think LinkedIn only cater to an older
audience though, millennials actually make up about 25%
of the user-based. LinkedIn can be a
great social platform for sharing business updates, industry insights, and even sharing glimpses into
your company culture. Keep in mind though,
that LinkedIn isn't a platform for hard selling
your products and services, and the algorithm is not
going to be kind if you post a lot of outbound links going out towards
your own website, LinkedIn's value
instead comes from the meaningful connections
you can forge there. Is LinkedIn the right social network for
you and your brand? Add it to your
strategy document, and let's move on
to the next lesson where we will discuss TikTok.
9. TikTok: TikTok may well be the
cocky young upstart on the social media circuit, but in its short life span, it's already had
a massive impact. Since its launch
in September 2016, this video sharing focused social media network
has grown to over 1.4 billion monthly users and consistently sets trends that go viral across
all other social platforms. TikTok has users across
the entire age spectrum, from 13 to over 50, but its largest demographic
is 16-24 year old age group. It's really important to stay well informed of
the latest trends across TikTok and to create content that
follows these trends. This gives you the best
chance of having your content appear in more feeds,
reaching a larger audience. The good news about TikTok
is that the algorithm completely ignores
follower accounts or views on previous videos of yours when it comes
to whether or not your content will be
recommended to somebody else. Instead, TikTok tries to match
the content to its user, and will happily present
content from smaller accounts if they think it's
going to be a good fit to the person they're
presenting it to. This makes it a
great platform for new companies and creates
a devoted following. If you can regularly upload
videos that not only inform, entertain your audience, you're likely to
do well on TikTok. TikTok as a platform requires effort and consistency to grow. But if you're up
for the challenge, then add this social
media network to your strategy documents and make some notes
on the type of videos that you can see yourself
posting on the platform. If you do dive into TikTok, you should spend some time
familiarizing yourself with the types of popular
content on the platform. Posts that go viral tend to
be a very specific style, so immersing yourself
in the platform, is very important to make sure
that you can do the same. Next, we're going to be
discussing how your company can use Discord as a
social media tool. Come with me, and
let's take a look.
10. Discord: Discord has skyrocketed in popularity among companies
over the last few years with many established brands creating their own servers
and using them to grow and nurture
their communities. Discord enables brands to bring their core community together in a close, intimate setting. This allows staff to be
able to directly build relationships with individuals
using your product, which is key when
creating a community of low users and brand applicants. It's a place where the
people who interact with your company can do so in a much more personal way than most other social
media platforms allow. It makes it an especially
powerful tool to use when you already have
an established community. Additionally, it offers a
platform on which you can host engaging virtual
events for your users, such as networking events,
game nights, and more. This gives you the
chance to engage with the community members who might not be located in the same country or even
continent as you. But the focus of these events
can be entirely up to you. Maybe you want to
use them to share expert insights or show early access products to
the most investment members of your community or even
just to kick back and have some fun and strengthen your connection to people
supporting your company. Whatever it is, there's a
lot of value to be had in a Discord server
when you have the following to make it inactive
and engaging place started. Nobody wants a join
an inactive server, so I would recommend
that you establish yourself on more mainstream
social platforms first, before introducing Discord into the range of channels
that you use. This will help ensure a strong launch and lessens the risk of committing time to a server only a few people end up using. If you think a Discord server
could be of benefit to your brand in the future
or perhaps even now, add it to your social media
strategy document and include what the main purpose
of the server would be. Now that we've discussed
all the major players as far as social media
platforms go, and hopefully, you've got a decent idea of
what to focus your efforts, we're going to ask you to
join us as we move on to talk about setting goals for
your social media strategy.
11. Setting goals that make sense: Now that you have an
idea of where you want to be active
on social media? It's time to turn
our attention to why you want to be there
in the first place. We won't be going into
too much depth on each metric that can be
used as an objective, either as a mountain
or a growth target. As the most important
ones, we will have their time to shine
later on in this course. We will assume that things like engagement or
following will be the first things
in your mind when it comes to goals
in social media, but there is a lot
that can be gained outside of the real stats
that can help your brand. Your social media accounts, in most cases, aren't the
end point of your brand. You likely have a website
you want customers to visit, a product you want
people to buy, or a service you
want to be used. In these cases, converting impressions and
engagement into clicks, and page views, and ultimately sales should be a goal you set. Having a lot of
followers who love your memes and videos is great. But if none of them
use your product or service and it's not achieving what you need
from a business standpoint, this doesn't mean that your
entire social media strategy should be appraised solely
on click-through though, nor should it just be
about making people retweet or share your posts? Social media is complicated
and multifaceted, so your aims for
it should be too. You want to have a
few different targets in mind at any given time. Just aiming to work on one
area, maybe okay initially, between two single-minded
on one area can also hurt your
brand overall. It feel that other facets won't. Therefore, you need to decide what matters to
you and trying to have aims in two or three areas that support that
overall objective. The last thing to
think about when deciding where to set goals is, how to balance, how ambitious, and realistic your targets are? Setting goals too low could
have motivational strive for improvement and easy targets won't really help your brand. On the other hand, being too ambitious can lead
more mist goals, which doesn't look or feel great and can make you
feel like you want to achieve in a great deal. The safest rule of thumb then, it's a set targets that
you'd be proud of achieving or also being able to do so
in a realistic time-frame. You should maybe give
or take about 20 percent of when you
think about achieve something to give it some leeway of when it
could actually happen. This means that we're
pushing yourself to make everything happen in
time for your goals, but you won't be fighting
a very steep hill that actually feels unrealistic
or impossible. Having multiple goals
really helps in this area as even if you
fall short in one of them, there's still other
positives that can come from other areas
of your strategy. Once a goal is achieved,
its high fives all around before you set a
new one to take its place. You very rarely want to
stand still on social media, especially when it comes
to growth improvement, so don't be idle for too long. We want you to have
a think and set yourself three clear goals for your brand in social media
as your lesson assignment. Make some notes on
what you want to get out of your accounts, and turn these into
things that can be quantified, and achieved. You should also have to
think about how you will likely be gone about
achieving your goals, but don't go too far down
that path before moving on to our next few lessons, we'll be covering
those in there. A few ideas of what
you could aim to achieve from social
media to get started, products sales, leads generated, phone calls made,
brand recognition, website traffic,
or messages from people interested in
using your service. Once you've outlined a few goals that work for your business, we will be introducing
you to some useful tools you
should be looking at to make your life on social media that
little bit easier.
12. Helpful social media management tools: Now that you've set some realistic
goals for your brand social media, it can still be daunting to make the first
moves towards achieving them. The good news here
is that you're not alone in this endeavor. There are a number of
tools that you and your team can use that will
set you up for success. These will make your job so much easier in multiple
different ways, as well as making your
social media feed more effective and more present. Having a scheduling tool for your social media is
almost essential. Your social media presence
will need to be consistent. We're talking around
the clock coverage, post multiple time zones and
even some over the weekends, there were also online
tools that can help you analyze your social
media performance, providing in-depth reporting
and analysis on your metrics. The first tool that
you should take a look at is Tweetdeck. This is a free dashboard application designed to make managing Twitter
accounts easier,. Owned by Twitter themselves, this application
integrates seamlessly with the social networks interface and can help with
monitoring engagement, scheduling, as well as tracking hashtags and search terms that are of interest
to your brand. If your company's
active on Twitter, then you should absolutely
be using Tweetdeck. For a more comprehensive tool, you should look into Buffer, Hootsuite, or Sprout Social. All three of these
offer publishing calendar/scheduling
functionality, as well as analytics
and reporting features. Finding a tool that
works for you is a decision that should be
made after some research, you shouldn't just dive into it, and that is the class
assignment for this lesson. Take some time to research these tools as well as any
others that you are aware of and evaluate which
might be best for your brand. Take into consideration each
platform's feature set, cost, and user interface. Most offer a free
trial so you can get some hands-on experience before you choose which
one to commit to. Once you've completed your
research, add your choice of social media management tool
to your work in progress, social media strategy document. Next, we're going
to take a look at what data will help
you to stay on track and inform your
content strategy to drive growth in your
social media plans.
13. Identifying key metrics: How do you know if you've
been growing and achieving your goals? With
data, of course! That's why this
lesson is all about, how to identify key metrics
and what they actually mean. Let's jump in with
the big one, reach. Reach, called impressions
on some sites, it's simply the number of
users that see your posts. They don't have to interact with
them, or acknowledge the post, but they all count towards
your overall reach. After all, people can't
interact in your content, much less by or be converted, if you don't even
see them in the beginning, so you can view reach,
as basically, the beginning of your
social media funnel. Reach can turn into
engagement and sales, and then you and your team into a happy social media squad. We mentioned engagement
just there so let's backtrack a little bit and explore what
that actually means. Engagement refers
to how many people interact with your content. Either by liking it, sharing
it, or commenting on it. Your engagement rate should
absolutely be a goal that you set yourself as
a social media manager, as it shows that people who see your posts are interested
enough to interact with them. High engagement is the dream of every social media manager,
as it shows you're providing posts of value to the people that you want
to be in your community. For many businesses,
click-through is perhaps the most
important metric to be watching, unless social media is 100 percent of your brand. We spoke earlier in this course about setting goals to convert users on social into
customers or leads, and measuring how many people clicked through to
your website or your products is a great way of seeing how well you're
doing in this regard. Generally speaking then,
in terms of social media, impressions are good, engagement is better, and
click-through is best. To bring people from
social's on to your website, you should give them
as many opportunities to do so as you can. We're talking website
links in your bio, website links in
your social posts, and other directions
to check out your products or services. Remember, they
currently seeing you on social media, and if you want to convert them to
a website user, customer, or client, you need to make it easy
for them to do so. Therefore, the more
opportunities you give them to click through to
your website the better. Remember to actually
provide your users with frequent opportunities to
click through to your site or services, and make your
other channels of social media - like website - prominent on your account page. Now that we know these
three main metrics and how they link together
with your business goals, we can start thinking
about the data of how you measure these targets. Most social platforms will have their own analytics platforms
for this exact purpose. Make it a weekly task of yours to go over data,
in broad strokes, and a monthly task
to fully evaluate your performance over
the past 30-days. This will help you
replicate what is done well in the future, as well as stay away
from anything that's done poorly from the last month. For your assignment, let's link up the goals
you've already listed on your strategy document and the data we've
discussed here. How are they related? How can you best monitor and
quantify your targets? We want you to link
a data point to each target you've listed down and decide what's best to show your progress. Is it reach? Is it impressions? Is it click-through? Or is
it something else? Then we can move onto
your next lesson, which is all about
planning your content.
14. Planning your content: We've spoken a lot
about the macro concept of social media. The platforms and goal setting, as well as the tools
and data behind it. It's about time then
that we looked at the more micro concepts, that is the stuff
that we're actually posting and providing
to your audience. Your social media is nothing
without your content, So let's talk about how
you can make this the absolute best it can be. Before we kick off, make
sure that you always keep your brand message in mind. The type of content that
you produce will largely be dictated by the people that
you're trying to reach, and therefore they're
crucial to keep in mind whenever you're
planning any social posts. First, let's talk about stories or the limited-time content. This is interactive
content that only remains on your account for a
short period of time., and it appears high up on the
page or app for your users. Stories are great for driving
impressions as they keep a brand front and
center for people and they can tap into FOMO, which is fear of missing out. Stories are great for
content that doesn't serve too much purpose outside of creating a personality
for your brand, like fun little videos
or posts that won't have much relevance in the future.
This can be event use, for example. Keeping with the visual theme, short-form video
content is arguably the most valuable content you
can put out for your brand. It's been picked up on by social media platforms
with the likes of TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter profiles, all benefiting from videos
that are short and snappy. It's fairly obvious that
the higher the production value of this content, the more professional
your brand will look, but at its basic level, all you need to make
short-form video content is a smartphone and an idea. Graphical content
outside of videos should also be a staple of
your social media feed. Well-made graphics and gifs can be one of the main assets that set your brand apart
from the competition. Adding an image to a post
almost always increases how well it does because it becomes
much more eye-catching. Well, text-only
post can do well, graphics are what you want the lion's share
of your content to be if you have the ability to produce top-quality assets. Something that is always worth considering when deciding how to use different media is what
your competitors are doing. You shouldn't be derivative
with the content at all, but seeing what people are doing in the same space as you helps spark ideas for future ideas that are going to
be unique to yourself. Remember to always consider
quality versus quantity when deciding what kind of content
you want to be posting. If you don't have
the means to create high-quality videos then don't shoehorn them into your plan. It's just going to look poor. Instead, you want
to try and create a good number of posts that can be valuable for
your target audience without harming the timeline. Too many posts and you risk your followers becoming bored
or annoyed at you. Too little, then they
forget about you entirely. Your assignment for this lesson is to have another look back at your social media
goals and decide what kind of content will best
help you achieve them best between
limited-time stories, videos, graphics,
and text posts. Add these ideas to your
planning documents and then head over to
the next lesson. We'll focus on the balance
between different types of content you'll
post on your feed.
15. Reuse, recycle (your social content): Now, let's talk about how we should be
balancing content between reactive and evergreen
posts and how you can make your content work for you even after it's been posted. Some of your content
is bound to be reactive, that is to say, content that's only going to be valuable in the here and now. Stories and
other time-sensitive posts, as well as most interactions
with other brands and trends should be a minor
way in which you use time. You can't really make these posts relevant in the long term, so don't worry about spending hours and
hours in this area. Instead, you want most of
your content to be evergreen. Posts and content that
can create value and be relevant to people long
after it's been made. The way that you can do
this depends on your brand. As some will have an easier
time of creating content, that will be worth revisiting
at six months than others. Article and video content can often remain relevant
after they've been posted since the
message of longform content is often designed to
survive for years to come. This is obviously not
true in every case with event and sale announcement videos being
a clear example of when this doesn't hold true, but generally, you can generally consider longer-form content to
have a longer lifespan. You shouldn't just
throw your content out to the public and
leave it at that, especially if you
want to maximize the reaction to and
value of the post. Try resharing the post
at a different time of day to catch a different
demographic of user. For example, if you posted something at
mid-day for Europe, consider re-sharing
it in the evening to the US demographic. Doing this means you can reach people who
may not have seen the original post if it was
shared at 2:00 AM for them. You can also try
this a couple of days after your
content was posted, as it can grab people
who are either busy or just not online the day that you first
made your tweet. Scheduling tools like
Buffer can help you reshare existing content at
different post time or date. Content can also be reframed, assuming that's a
very narrow piece and used to create
several different posts. For example, if you
make a video that explains five things within
your area of expertise, you can also break
this down into five different social posts
for a different platform. This way, you've
done the research once but gained twice
the value from it. Avoid posting the same
video or content multiple times in quick succession as this will bore
your followers. But spreading it out
among a few days or weeks can help you catch new
eyes with a fresh angle. If you're a talented editor, you can also edit old content to make new posts with the same
raw footage or research. This takes a little longer
than a simple repost or retweet but is a high-value option if you
have the time to do so. The final option is
tracking your content and using it in a
reactive fashion. Have you seen somebody
who's tweeting about wanting to know
how to invest in stocks and have you got an on-brand article that explains how to do just that? Link it to them. You might
build a new follower or user. Knowing what you have to offer, and offering it
to the community, and those who aren't even
part of the community just yet is a good way of finding
new eyes for your work. Don't spam it all over the place as this will only bother people, but be tactical, and it'll
likely build you a new fan. If you follow these
tips, you should have a varied and efficient
social media presence that doesn't need
a new post every single second to gain traction. Next up, we'll be looking at
your brand's voice.
16. Creating and maintaining your brand voice: We've spoken a lot already about what kind of content you
should be creating, but it's just as
important to know how to present that content. This lesson is all about
creating a brand voice and maintaining it throughout
your social media strategy. Your brand should
be something that people want to interact with, but you also want
to avoid slipping into too much of a casual tone. You want to remain professional, but show some personality
and prove that there is a human behind the
words and graphics. This can be a fine line to walk, and if in doubt you should verge on the side of professionalism, but doing this
correctly will give you a really powerful
social media presence. The general social
media audience responds best to brands
that are engaging, transparent, and offer
strong customer service. We'll quickly break down each
of these and suggest how your brand voice
can make your brand successful in these three areas. When it comes to being
engaging, content is king. If your content is bland, it won't reach very many people. Even if your product isn't
the most exciting thing ever, that's no excuse
for bland content. Job postings at their core
are just job postings, but we've managed to create our social media presence
that people want to follow. Avoid being too corporate, interact with your audience
and couple your posts with graphic and video support to create an engaging brand voice. Transparency and honesty
go hand in hand, and in most cases this will be automatic to adopt
into your brand voice. You earn your stripes as
a social media manager by how you respond to
things when they go wrong. When serious issues arise, you need to be honest
and treat them with respect and sincerity. You want your brand to be
one that people can trust, and building that up takes
effort and consistency. You might have to
deviate from your natural brand voice
in times of trouble, for example, if your normal tone is quite loose and informal, you wouldn't use
this one announcing a delay in shipping
people's orders, it just wouldn't be correct, but you should revert back
to your brand voice once the storm has passed to maintain consistency in your feed. Equally, when small
issues arise, such as small typos in
social media posts, feel free to own the mistake and let it humanize your
brand a little. You should absolutely treat a customer service
query with care, but if you've used the wrong
form of your in a post, then feel free to
make a joke out of it if the community
does highlight it. On the customer service point, remember that you're
one member of a larger team in
this department. A social media manager may well be the first point of
contact for a user, but you don't need to
be an encyclopedia on every single issue. Respond to queries
in a timely fashion, but remember that this can
just be a case of knowledge in the query and saying you'll check things out and get
back to the person. You're unlikely to be the
head of social media, sales, operations,
HR and shipping, and if you are,
we think you need a little pay rise, so instead, consider customer
service on social media, almost like a directory. If you can solve a problem for somebody yourself, then do so. If not, find the person in
your team who's best suited to deal with that problem and pass the information onto them. You should always
do your research as well before responding to customer service queries and know when to tag in your
team for assistance. Keep in mind your tone as well. Something that may be minor to you or seem like a small issue, may be a massive one to somebody who uses your
platform or product, so be respectful
in your messaging. Remember that if you've switched to a more
formal tone and answer a DM to switch back into your regular brand voice for the next public
message that you post. The last thing to
note is that while your approach on different
platforms may be different, your brand voice should
largely remain consistent. Yes, your LinkedIn copy is
going to be more formal than your TikTok content based on the nature of the platforms, but that doesn't
mean you want to be writing long paragraphs on one and swearing on the
other, it doesn't match up. Somebody seeing both posts should be able to
recognize that it's your brand behind it just
from how it's presented. To recap then, you want to be approachable as a brand
but still professional. You want to be honest and
engaging and know how to adapt your tone from
situation to situation. Finally, you want
to be consistent in what your brand voice is, even if the content
or general audiences shifts a little from
platform to platform. Next up, we'll be
looking at how you can raise engagement with your
social media content. Join us in that next class.
17. How to achieve higher engagement: We've already mentioned
why engagement is so important on social media, so we thought it would
be valuable to set aside a whole lesson to bring these ideas together so
you have everything that you need to create
an engaging feed. Staying up to date
with your community will help you when it
comes to engagement. People on social media love
following the latest trends, that's what makes some
trends after all. Keeping your eyes
and how your brand can make up-to-date
content around the latest trend or meme will make it more
appealing to interact with. On the other hand, creating late or out
of touch content can make your brand seem dull. You don't want always
be trend chasing, but you should be
evaluating what's in conversation at any given time and if you can utilize it. This leads us to
the question of how can I stay up-to-date
with what's happening in my industry and on
social media in general? Well, we do have a few handy
resources to recommend here, but the easiest way is to
make sure that you spend some time every single day
scrolling down your feed. If you're following
relevant industry accounts, your homepage feed can give you valuable insight into what's
trending in your space. You should also be checking relevant industry journals and websites on a regular basis. To keep informed
of trends within the social media
space, specifically, resources like HubSpot and the Content Marketing Institute
are well-worth utilizing. Don't underestimate
the power of a meme. Social media loves a good meme, and although you don't want
to flood your feed with them, they can be a valuable tool
to increase engagement, add some character
to your posts, and communicate your brand
message in a creative way. The r/memeeconomy subreddit
can be an excellent place to find new trending meme templates that you can modify to
work for your brand. Something that is going to
incentivize your community to interact with your brand
is to truly value them. Keep your ear to the ground and see what your followers
are interested in, and if you're struggling,
you can always just ask. Ask what your community
is interested in and then provide
that if you can. It gives them no excuse not
to interact after doing that. After you've drafted
a great post, that your community
will want to see, how do we get eyes on it? We spoke about this
already in this course, but utilizing graphics
and videos is an excellent way of
making your content pop. It's also a great
way of boosting engagement metrics as watching a video or interacting
with the picture, counts as a form of engagement. You can't make every post an amazing video or
graphic, of course, but utilizing them for the ones you really
want to do well, will give them that extra boost. Engagement shouldn't
be your only goal though and remembering that social media success isn't only defined by numbers is important, but we hope these tips can turbocharge your content
engagement in the future. Now, let's move on to
our next lesson where we'll talk about how to
grow your following.
18. How to boost your following: In this lesson, we're going to focus on how you successfully grow your following across
your social media accounts. Firstly, when it comes
to follower growth, it's about quality,
not quantity. This means you should never
be using services like bought followers to
artificially engineer growth. Buying followers may
look impressive at first glance and feel like an easy route
to your end goal, but they don't engage with
your content or buy into your brand, and are therefore
a waste of time and money. Instead, focus on
creating and sharing eye-catching and engaging
content on your social media, which will give people
incentive to follow you, as well as to engage
with your posts. No matter what goals you have or which social media
channels you use, it's important to have
original content to share with your
audience, otherwise what makes your channels
unique and attractive? Another strategy that
can instantly create buzz around your
brand are giveaways. Giveaways or contests are a great way to start an online conversation about your brand. A good social media
giveaway should accomplish both of the methods
mentioned in this lesson. It should feature a
highly shareable post, which will drive
social shares by itself, or the giveaway entry
criteria should accomplish a secondary goal of growing
your social media audience by requiring entrants
to follow you on the various platforms
that you're active on. Lastly, never be afraid to use paid advertising across your
social media platforms. It's not cheating and can create some really
amazing results, especially for newly created
social media accounts. It gets you those
first few followers. Not only does paid advertising fast track you to your goals, but it also boosts the
reach of your posts, increasing your visibility
to potential new followers. Just make sure you're
committing to spend to a platform you know
you're going to be on for the long-term. This comes back to why choosing the correct social
platform for your business is so important. If you're not confident
on how long you're going to be on a
certain platform, then it's best to
test the waters with organic content
to begin with. The key points to creating a successful social
media presence for your brand consists of
eye-catching/engaging content, on trend discussions,
engaging with your audience, and the perfect balance between organic and paid promotion. It's time now to move
on and discuss one of the most important aspects of a social media presence,
being authentic.
19. Be authentic: Welcome to our
penultimate lesson in this social media
strategy course. In this one, we're
going to be focusing on the importance of maintaining an authentic personality and tone of voice across your
social media channels, and ultimately the benefits
this can bring your brand. Followers aren't
interested in brands, the post dry, corporate
style social media posts. Instead, it's important to allow your brand's personality, quirks, and values to shine through the
content you produce. Don't be afraid to be playful. It's crucial to remain human throughout your content also, and focus on responding
to your community, the replies to your
content and user concerns. Not only does this help
drive off your engagement, but also assists in building a closer bond with members
of your community. Remember where possible
to acknowledge and respond to suggestions from
your followers and community. As users respect to brand that accepts and acts on feedback. Followers want to see
the real people behind your social profiles
and get to know them, rather than a stuffy persona
with no personality. Define your brand voice
into something people will enjoy engaging with and
stay authentic to that. Now, join me in our final lesson as we talk
about what comes next and how to put your social media strategy into action.
20. What's next?: Congratulations on making it to the final lesson in our
social media strategy course. By now, you should
have a completed social media strategy document outlining which platforms
you plan to be active on, what type of content
you'll post there, and what you want your
brand voice to feel like. Now, it's time to put all
that preparation into action. Set yourself up a content
calendar and start creating the content you know
your audience will love. It's important to remember
that social media is extremely fast moving, and you need to be adaptable. Setting a strong strategy
is the first step, but trends will change and your strategy will need
to be able to evolve over time to make sure that your social media presence
remains relevant. Don't fall into the trap of
thinking the strategy you've built up up to this point at
this course will work forever. Unfortunately, it
won't, so make sure you regularly review your
social media processes, and value what is
and isn't working, and adjust your
strategy based on that. Remember too, that social media is a collaborative sector. Reach out to other
organizations, brands, individuals, or influencers
to partner with, and you'll see you'll reach
growth from doing so. Finally, make sure
to have fun with it. If you have fun creating
and sharing your content, this will be apparent
to your audience, and they'll appreciate
that and have fun with you along the way. Thanks very much for taking
our social media course. We hope you found it valuable, and if you did, please leave
us a review down below. With all that said, from all
of us here at Hitmarker, take care, and the
best of luck with all your future social
media endeavors.
Hitmarker, Multi-award-winning job platform
