Social Media Strategy, Defined
A social strategy provides a game plan for your brand’s marketing efforts across all social media networks. It should answer the simple question, “What can we realistically expect to achieve on social media within the next X months?” In order to answer this question, the most important thing for a client to consider is their paid media budget. The performance of any branded social channel is reliant upon how much money is spent on promoting it through social ads, managed through the various control panels on each platform. No matter how creative your posts are, you will not move the needle without paid media. Great content is necessary to initiate phase 2, user engagement, but they’ll never see your creative in the first place without paid media. Knowing your budget tolerance for paid media is step one in determining what might be possible to achieve within your given timeframe. Ideally, you would know this number before creating your RFP for agencies and consultants. I would ask them, “how would you direct the spending of this budget?”. No one can tell you the exact results, but an experienced Strategist will be able to share case studies of clients who’ve increased their budgets, and what kind of results those clients saw.
A not so uncommon question we hear from new clients is, “How much should we expect to spend?” The answer is necessarily blunt, “…as much as you can afford.” If I were a marketing director or CMO, I would dedicate half or more of my social media budget to paid advertising. For the sake of argument, let’s just say that your company is new to this and you need to make an argument to your superiors for a reasonable budget. In that case, you can still build the bones of your strategy, the plan, without a solid number, it just can’t be initiated in any realistic way without a paid media budget.
A parent brand may have multiple channels on a single network. For instance, there might be a brand channel “Company X” and a separate channel for an individual product, “Company X’s Product A” and still another, “Customer Support for Product A”. The overarching brand strategy, at the “Company X” level will need to take into account the basic rules of decorum, graphics standards, messaging style, etc., while leaving each brand variant plenty of room to develop its own identity. The strategy is typically driven by sales goals such as “increasing sales by x%”, but may also take the form simply gaining awareness or influencing public opinion. Some brands don’t know what their goals are, only that they “need more followers”. In that instance, it is up to the consultant to recognize that, while yes, increased followers are an easy metric for anyone to understand, clients should begin to view engagement as the most important stat to watch (on social, clicks on ads). At the end of the day, that is what every brand wants – more. Brands At the end of the process the strategy manifests itself in the form of a document.
Remember to
never give up
If no one hates you, no one is paying attention. If attention is what you want for vanity, confidence, or, hell — to make a decent living — then know that it’s not instantaneous. Every single person that you’re currently paying attention to, at some point in their lives, was in your exact position. They kept at it and worked enough so that others started listening. Also know that if no one is watching, you can experience true freedom. Dance in your underwear. Write entirely for yourself. Swear like there’s a going-out-of-business sale on “fucks” and “shits.” Find yourself — not in some coming-of-age hippie way involving pasta and ashrams— but in a way that helps you draw your own line in the sand for what matters and what doesn’t. Do what you want to do, just because you want to do that thing. This will build confidence that will come in handy later.
