Creating a social media

strategy and audience development

April 2021

EUROZINE

5 Questions

1. Why do you want to be on social media?
2. Who is your target audience?
3. What are you going to share?
4. Where are you going share?
5. When are you going share?

Note: You can also have a strategy for each of your social media channels, such as a Facebook marketing strategy, a Twitter marketing strategy, and so on, which all lead up to your overall social media marketing strategy.

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S.M.A.R.T goals

Each of your goals should be:

1. Specific
2. Measurable
3. Attainable
4. Relevant
5. Time-bound

Track meaningful metrics

For example, if you use LinkedIn to drive traffic to your website, you would measure click-throughs. If Instagram is for brand awareness, you might track the number of Instagram Story views. And if you advertise on Facebook, cost-per-click (CPC) is a common success metric.

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Drive traffic to your website

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Boost engagement

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Build a community

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Listen to conversations about Eurozine

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Note: Generally, it’s great to focus on just a handful of goals unless you have a team, where different people or groups within the team can take on different goals (ie. Custom Support, Brand Awareness, Sales etc.).

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Why do you want to be on social media?

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Source:HootSuite

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Who are they? (E.g. job title, age, gender, salary, location, etc.)

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What are they interested in that you can provide? (E.g. entertainment, educational content, case studies, information on new products, etc.)

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How do they consume the content? (E.g. read social media posts, watch videos, etc.)

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When do they look for the type of content you can provide? (E.g. weekends)

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Note: Create audience personas Age, Location, average income, job title or industry, Interests…

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• Gather data

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Who is your target audience?

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What are you going to share? �*Should the right question here be: ‘Wait, Do you want to share videos or images?’ ? �NO, not necessarily.

THEME(S)

Look at your marketing personas and consider the following questions:�

• What goals and challenges do they have?
• How can you help solve them?

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Note: It’ll be wise to at least have a complete profile on the Big Four :( — Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn — as they would often show up on the first page of Google search results when people search for your brand. Consider smaller, niche platforms, too.

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Where are you going to share? Aka which social media platforms do you want to be on?

1. Which platforms are your target audience most active on? What makes them visit that platform?
2. What is your brand’s “X factor”? Are you great at photography, videos, or writing? �Certain platforms lend itself well to certain content types.. Photos are great on Instagram, long-form videos on YouTube, articles on Medium.

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CrowdTangle, Google Analytics, Parse.ly, Social Flow, and Dash Hudson.

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Tools

When do your audience usually use social media to find the type of content that you’ll share?

Recommended reading

When?

Do a social media audit

If you’re already using social media, take stock of your efforts so far. Ask yourself the following questions:

• What’s working, and what’s not?
• Who is engaging with your content on social media?
• Which networks does your target audience use?
• How does your social media presence compare to the competition?

Note: Social media listening tools

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Create a social media content calendar

• Set your posting schedule
• Determine the right content mix (What is Right Content Mix?)
• Scheduling tools, Buffer, HootSuite etc.

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The social media rule of thirds:

• One-third of your content promotes your brand,, converts readers, and generates profit. (?)
• One-third of your content shares ideas and stories from thought leaders in your industry or like-minded businesses.
• One-third of your content is personal interactions with your audience� � OR�80% of your posts should inform, educate, or entertain your audience�20% can directly promote your brand.

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Popular Digital Publishing Content Formats in 2021

• Visual first stories The key to an engaging and memorable visual story is a clear narrative structure.
• Immersive/Interactive Podcasts
• Vertical Video Since the rise of platforms like Instagram Stories, vertical video has taken over and become an innovative way for individuals and businesses to tell stories.
• Gamification
• Virtual Performances & Events Using social media before, during and after virtual events is a great way to keep your audience informed, happy and engaged.

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SEO

Search engine optimization is the practice of increasing the organic visibility of a web page in search results. Although businesses can pay for ads on search engine results page, SEO refers to “free” tactics that enhance the search ranking of a page.

• SERP: Search engine results page
• Search rank: The position a URL holds on a SERP for a particular keyword
• Search visibility: A metric used to calculate how visible a website or page is on a SERP. If the number is at 100 percent, for example, that would mean the URL is ranking in the first position for a keyword(s). Search visibility is especially important when tracking the aggregate ranking of a website for a basket of keywords.
• Domain or page authority: The strength of a website or page on a particular subject in the eyes of search engines.

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Basic SEO (in a nutshell)

• Write longer posts
• Produce fresh content
• Use keywords
• Optimize your title, meta description, and headings
• Optimize your URLs
• Hunt for backlinks
• Link to others
• Link to yourself
• Optimize your images

Note: Social marketers should also take note of the implications of paid promotion on SEO. Paid promotion has nearly double the SEO benefit of organic promotion.�SEO should be thoughtfully integrated into your broader social marketing strategy, but it should not be the driving force.

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• Use a plugin like YoastSEO
• Avoid Flash
• Optimize your social media
• Consider site speed
• Make your website mobile-friendly
• Create a sitemap
• Create a robots.txt file
• Measure your results
• Think about your users

Social media goal: Build and manage an engaged community

Key metrics related to community engagement include but not limited to:

• audience growth rate
• engagement rate (Engagement analytics tools)
• amplification rate
• applause rate
• click-through rate
• bounce rate
• conversation rate
• net promoter score

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• Write longer posts
• Produce fresh content
• Use keywords
• Optimize your title, meta description, and headings
• Optimize your URLs
• Hunt for backlinks
• Link to others
• Link to yourself
• Optimize your images

Note: Social marketers should also take note of the implications of paid promotion on SEO. Paid promotion has nearly double the SEO benefit of organic promotion.�SEO should be thoughtfully integrated into your broader social marketing strategy, but it should not be the driving force.

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FMM Frequently Made Mistakes

• Focusing on quantity over quality
• Being on all social media platforms
• Posting the same content across platforms
• Using only landscape images and videos
• Sharing only your own content
• Not curating user-generated content
• Not uploading videos to social media platforms
• Not targeting specific audience for our content
• Not boosting the right posts
• Not replying to questions on social (fast enough)

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• Write longer posts
• Produce fresh content
• Use keywords
• Optimize your title, meta description, and headings
• Optimize your URLs
• Hunt for backlinks
• Link to others
• Link to yourself
• Optimize your images

Note: Social marketers should also take note of the implications of paid promotion on SEO. Paid promotion has nearly double the SEO benefit of organic promotion.�SEO should be thoughtfully integrated into your broader social marketing strategy, but it should not be the driving force.

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Case

Studies

Dove – Connecting with their target audience

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Dove did some research and found that 80 percent of women came across negative chatter on social media. Dove’s goal was to change that and make social media a more positive experience. As a result, Dove teamed up with Twitter and built a tool to launch the #SpeakBeautiful Effect, that breaks down which body- related words people use the most and when negative chatter appears during the day.

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NEW YORKER- Anticipation & Personal tone

Experience The New Yorker’s social strategy is extensive: The magazine has a presence on big platforms like Facebook / Twitter / Instagram and Tumblr but also on more niche platforms like Foursquare /Pinterest / LinkedIn and Google Plus.

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1. Reveal New Yorker content days before publication in print.
2. Paid content approach
3. Social media is a critical part of The New Yorker's editorial strategy—it is often where readers encounter stories, videos, podcasts, cartoons, and upcoming events for the first time. (Anticipation)
4. A core part of The New Yorker’s digital strategy are blogs like Culture Desk, Page Turner, Currency and Elements, which inject The New Yorker’s informed sensibility with the speed and tone that Web users expect.
5. Audiogram series on first-time voters and a photo series on the nail artist Naomi Yasuda. They delivered special messages from New Yorker Festival talent, and brought followers behind the scenes to a softball game in Central Park, where The New Yorker battled Esquire.

Discussion

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