6 Key Essential Focus Areas in Social Media Strategy

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With changes happening every day in social media marketing, it's important for brands to focus on some key essential elements  their social strategy. Social media consumption habits are changing, new platforms are emerging, and new challenges arise. Here are six key elements you need to focus on for your brand's social strategy.

1. Develop a brand social media guideline

It's it is essential that brands set up proper social media guidelines for all staff to follow. And make sure your agency follows these as well. Your brand's reputation is on the line – and without clear guidelines, both from a content and tone of voice point of view, it can get a bit difficult to manage. Also make sure your brand's logo is used, how the products are featured, and how they are written about follow easy to understand and maintain guidelines.

2. Define global vs regional vs local strategy

This is a difficult one to balance, so it needs some clear focus. Particularly for global or regional brands, it's important to have a framework. While a typical brand might follow a global strategy – where consistency across all channels and geographies is consistent – another company may choose to speak to their audience in a colloquial or cultural context and a different tone of voice.

For many companies, while that may be costly and tricky to manage, the decision to employ local, in-house teams often proves to be the most successful. But they must follow a framework that's defined.

3. Choosing the Right Social Media Channels

Who makes the decision on which social media channel your brand or business should be on? Should you just jump on every new platform that comes your way?  Is your brand really relevant across all the channels you are on?

It's not just about resources, it is about how your brand aligns with each channel. It is about how your brand fits in to the ecosystem of the channel or platform, and then ensuring that your content resonates well within those parameters. You cannot be everything for everybody. You'll need some kind of audience segmentation strategy in place.

Read more : Choosing the right social media channels for your brand

4. Engaging the audience with conversation and consistency

It's not advertising, social media is about having a conversation and engaging the audience consistently.

Instead of using social as a one-way platform, the best way forward is to create content that encourages conversation, while maintaining its brand values and personality.

A consistent posting schedule and consistent social-friendly tone of voice is crucial when it comes to keeping an audience engaged. Remember, it's all about relevant, value adding content.

Content Marketing Strategy: What kind of content should you create?

5. Managing responses and issues

Social media is a conversation, and responding in time and making an effort with that response, and being honest, truthful and transparent is key. Many brands today fail to see how social is fast becoming a Customer Experience (Service) channel. Specially with customer complaints, or audience reactions to a post (or an ad) that did not resonate, or even offended them requires careful crafting and timing of a response. 

Make response and issues managing a focus area. Have guidelines in place for your social team or agency to follow.

6. Frequency: How often, how much

There is no definitive guide to social media post frequency. It depends – on your audience, your goals, and the results you get. This means that the only way to truly master it is to experiment, analyze your results and adjust accordingly. Yes, of course you can end up posting too much or too little to start with. But you'll learn quick. 

Each social platform has best practices for how often to posts, but there isn’t a specific number. You'll see brands tweeting four times a day and see a lot of success, while you'll see users that tweet four times per hour, and swear by it. In order to figure out what works best for your business, you will need to experiment. 

Your audience will often tell you how much is too much or too little by way of their reactions. Measure and repeat what works. The trick is in finding a balance – between engaging and informative vs annoying and over bearing.

Read more on Social Media Frequency 2016: How often should you post.

and, how to learn from your audience:
The importance of listening in social media, and how to get it right

And that's the basics. That's Digital Marketing Strategies 101. Please share this post with your friends and colleagues today... And do comment if you feel you want to add to this.

More reading on Social Media Strategy

• Setting Social Media Goals and Tracking Success Made Simple

• 11 simple ways for brands to build better following on social media

• Customer Insights is your First Step in Digital Marketing