As 2018 draws to a close, marketing teams for brands and businesses are already hard at work building a marketing strategy for 2019 and social media managers are no different.
It’s super super important to build a clear social media marketing strategy for the year in advance so that you have enough time to develop an actionable plan according to your strategy.
But before you even work on a strategy, you need to undertake a few steps to ensure you build a successful strategy. Let’s get to it? 👉

1. Analyze your past year’s social performance 💹

This has to be done before you even think about developing a strategy for the new year.

Analysing your performance in the past year and deep diving into your metrics will help you calculate the effectiveness of your past strategy and then, help you decide the new objectives for the next year.

So make sure you perform an in-depth analysis of all your socials before planning anything new. Past year’s metrics will help you understand what worked for your brand and why didn’t. It’ll also help you understand which platform did better as compared to others.
But most importantly, it’ll help you understand the ROI of your social performance keeping your company’s goals in mind.
Third party management tools like Crowdfire help you pull detailed analytics of your socials so that you can get a better understanding of your social performance.

2. Set Clear Goals ✅

It’s useless developing a strategy without even knowing what your end goals are. So spend some time deciding on what exactly do you want to achieve this year for your socials.
It’s also extremely important to make sure that your social goals align with the goals of your business or brand.
What are the objectives you’re chasing?

1. Is it more brand awareness you want?

2. Or do you want to generate more sales leads on social?

3. Or are you looking for more traffic on your website?
4. Or are you looking for customer conversions?
   Make sure you’ve set clear goals you want to achieve before getting started on strategizing because this is what’s going to make your strategy measurable.
   > Also, make sure that these goals are high, but achievable. Don’t aim too high, but don’t even underplay your efforts.

3. Set metrics to track those goals 🔢

Once you’ve set your goals, you then need to decide on the metrics you plan on chasing for those goals. This is what will make your strategy actionable because long term goals can be very vague. Don’t talk in terms of “more”. Talk numbers.

1. If you’re looking for brand awareness, you can track your new followers
2. If you’re looking for more engagement, you can track the number of likes, shares and comments on your posts
3. If you’re looking for more traffic, you can track the number of clicks and so on.

Make sure you convert these “more” and “better” to clear, trackable numbers to know exactly how you’re performing in terms of social.

4. Decide which platforms you’re going to focus on

Social media is an ever evolving space. Platforms which are better for certain businesses today might not perform the same way in a few years.
It’s super important to find out which platforms suit your business better or which platforms helped you achieve last year’s goals before deciding on what to focus on next. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not asking you to completely abandon platforms which which gave you lesser ROI, but you need to put more efforts into platforms which gave you better results.
Facebook — Facebook is great for generating traffic, but it has the worst organic reach. So unless you’re willing to pay, it doesn’t make sense to spend time creating content for Facebook.
Instagram — Instagram focuses on visual content with more and more focus on videos this past year. So unless you’re willing to create high quality visual content with a mix of video, posting on Instagram might not be too fruitful for your brand.
Twitter — Twitter is a great place to interact and engage with your users in lesser words. So unless you’re willing to reply back or are good at interacting in a few words, Twitter strategies won’t make sense for your brand.
Linkedin — Linkedin is the more professional looking platform compared to Twitter and Facebook. So your strategy needs to be mouldable for a more professional audience.
Pinterest — Pinterest again is a platform focused on visuals and almost no text. So if you’re not a brand focused on creating high quality visuals, your Pinterest focus might not be the best idea.
There are a lot more social platforms so you need to decide which ones are more important so that you don’t stretch yourself too thin trying to win everywhere.
Once you’ve analysed last year’s strategy, set new achievable goals, metrics to track and platforms to focus on for the next year, and you’re free to get started on the actual strategizing part.
Speaking of, we’re also working on releasing a Social Media Marketing Strategy for 2019 soon, so make sure you’re following our blog to know when it’s out.
Have anything to add? I’d love to discuss in the comments 😇