Questions You Need To Ask While Planning Social Media Content
Social Media is the buzz word today and the impact it’s creating is huge with a larger reach and low cost for all kinds of businesses alike. It has become an inseparable part of marketing strategy for any industry, company size and product or service offering.
The big question on everyone’s mind now is how to go about planning and scheduling social media. Given below are a few pointers to keep in mind when doing so.
1) What is being promoted?
Depending on what is being promoted, appropriate campaigns can be designed. It could be a single product launch, a range of products that follow one after the other or a holiday special. Depending on this, the social media calendar has to be prepared accordingly.
2) Are you clear with your goals?
The goals that are to be achieved by digital marketing need to be known and clearly understood, only then social media posts and campaigns can turn out to be success stories. They could be regarding an event attendance, sales or downloads.
3) Has the identification of your target audience been done?
Personas can be created to simulate and identify the goals, requirements and behavior of the potential customers. These personas are created to be able to know what are they looking for, their motivational factors, how we can help them and what could be their possible requirements year around at any given point in time.
4) How is the audience going to engage with what you’re promoting?
Personas are created for this very reason. Anything promoted on social media depends on how the audience is going to react to it. If you think it shall work, then only promote, or else, reconsider the thought and bring a new idea to the table.
5) Has each network been planned distinctly?
Every social media platform is distinct with its own features and hence, they all cannot be treated equally. And so, the recipe for promotion on different media should also have a distinct flavor. Promotion strategy created for Twitter might not work for Facebook and vice versa.
6) Is your content seasonal?
Holiday sales are a rage with all age groups. They are earnestly looked forward too, like the Great Online Shopping Festival at yearend is huge. Hence it’s important to prepare the yearly social media calendar accordingly. The timing and scheduling of these posts have to be absolutely precise, in a manner that keeps both buyers and potential buyers to keep coming back even after the sale is over.
7) Are your posts nimble enough to be replaced or rescheduled on short notice?
Despite all efforts that go into planning such events, the whole social media schedule can still go for a toss with a sudden change of events. Precisely for this reason, being flexible is the need of the hour, where content can be realigned and repackaged to address the change of events. Having a backup plan is thus, essential.
8) What’s worked well on social networks previously?
There are excellent analytical tools in the market today, which give a fair picture of what has worked well in the past on social media. Using this data to effective measure can bring out the best strategy to be used. Activities like measuring the ROI of marketing campaigns and how social media is driving traffic to your site are now possible, to further plan and schedule future posts.
9) Have the influencers been identified?
It’s basic human nature that we ask our family members, our near and dear ones, friends etc. regarding the choices we make when we are to choose a product or service. These people are known as influencers and they could be trendsetters in their respective arenas. This is where social media has made real in-roads. These people could be acquaintances only and may not have met in real life, yet have great influencing power, which has been realized by social media and are being targeted so much now.
