Social media for companies and brands is like a gold mine with a huge number of the target audience. However, changing algorithms, little knowledge of how to use those algorithms in your business’s favor, and having a vague social media plan can profoundly decrease the potential of having a social media presence. Every single social media website or application works as a lucrative platform where businesses and brands, today, can run education-based marketing campaigns.
These platforms are where a potential buyer looks at a product, studies about it, and decides to make a purchase. Developing a strategy will provide positive exposure, decision-influencing content, and an increase in the rate of conversion. With thousands of brands and millions of people trying to benefit from social media, you need to have a plan that works despite stiff competition. These platforms are constantly making changes to their algorithms to be as precise as possible. It makes blind promotions and ambiguous marketing almost futile. Thus, making social media strategy imperative for your business.
Why Social Media is Important for Your Business?
Around 42% (3.2 billion) of the world population is currently on social media, which makes any of those platforms a huge marketplace for both, small and gigantic businesses. With mobile opportunities being continuously improved, the number of social media users continues to grow every year. Among these users, millennials are the generation with the highest use of social media. Millennials make potential buyers, loyal customers, and instinct spenders. 54% of the time, a social browser is used to surf social media platforms to research products through product photographs, reviews, and recommendations. According to the latest studies, 73% of the marketers believe social media marketing can be anywhere between “somewhat effective” to “very effective” for a business. This explains why social media platforms are a lucrative market space for businesses that have a well-designed social media strategy to work with.
What is Social Media Strategy?
A social media strategy is a defined plan of how an organization, brand, or business will use social media to achieve certain goals, such as more awareness, online visibility, customer engagement, loyal customer base, or/and increased sales. A clear and well-tracked strategy enables a business to know whether it is succeeding or failing. It ensures that each comment, like, and share that a post gets serves a defined purpose.
When designed specifically, a social media strategy can put a business far ahead on the online market than multiple vague, poorly-planned marketing campaigns (which also cost a lot more).
However, that is not the only advantage of having a strategy for social media. There are multiple reasons and benefits of using one to boost a business. Enlisted below are 5 indisputable reasons to why you need one right away.
- Strategy Provides Direction
There are more than 10 popular social media platforms around the globe. Each platform has millions of users and thousands of businesses trying to benefit from these users. The stiff and cut-throat competition may cause a business to fail online if the actions used to achieve the goals on social media are not planned or powerful.
A strategy offers solid stats for measurable success or failure to increase the opportunities to improve. Each social media platform has a different algorithm, user age demographic, user interest, and structure. What works on Facebook will not work on Instagram. Similarly, what works on Twitter will not work on Tumblr. A well-researched strategy will enable you to focus on which market it should target, how, and why. It also provides more clarity about marketing goals and in which direction your business wants to aim before shooting.
Developing a social media strategy means you will be able to tailor every part of the platform towards your marketing and business goals. From the page’s bio to every post or story, everything will be working together towards the same objective. Otherwise, it is just a loose and vague plan.
- Every Action You Take is More Efficient
Being on social media just because it is the 21st century and you need to exist there for namesake online presence barely qualifies as a strategy. Your posts and actions on the platform must lead to achieving an ultimate goal, be it more followers or more engagement. Having a plan will allow you to pin down your goals and align your actions with them to get a desirable result (measurable success). This will also help you be more focused on what you need to do. A line of ideas will allow the creation of a variety of relevant content for increased and maintained consistency on the platform.
Each relevant and consistent action adds up with another to make your social media marketing more effective. Most of the time, the #1 reason behind why a business fails to create a prominent online presence is inconsistency. Erratic posts and big spurges of posts or social activity followed by long (days or even weeks) of silence. This not only makes it hard to get new followers but also drives existing followers away. Having a strategy eliminates this scenario.
Another way how a strategy improves efficiency is by cutting down unplanned social posts and helping with steady time management. With planning, you will be able to set aside a certain amount of time and stick to it, ensuring there isn’t any time wasted in fiddling, fidgeting, and playing around with pen nibs between the lips.
- Social Media Will Be Less Stressful
Strategizing social media can relieve a lot of stress that comes with using it to grow your business. When you are clear about what you are aiming for, how you are going to achieve it, and by spending what amount of time, social media marketing does not feel too stressful. Saving time and putting the right ways into boosting your business will also make it easier to stick to a budget. You will be saving time and money.
With little extra time up your sleeves, you might also decide to take a 5-minute break to refresh, reflect, and analyze.
- It Prepares You for the Future
A strategy allows you to plan ahead of time. This way if you ever find yourself without the leaders or partners, you will be able to handle a campaign all by yourself. Imagine working on Tumblr’s blog marketing when suddenly your content creator calls in sick! There will be a bedlam unless you have a well-laid plan to follow. Be it a small or big business, a radio silence in the middle of social media marketing can easily reverse the grown of that business. Not a single follower is permanent, trends are always changing, and even the most viral posts are soon forgotten.
To save yourself the mayhem, having a strategy becomes crucial. With a strategy, all the important content will be created before-hand. If you are organized, the content would already be fined-tuned as posts, blogs, or stories. If you happen to be perfectly organized, they will be scheduled too. In this way, the only thing left to do is to respond to the audience, which is not as stressful as handling a social media project single-handedly with no content or strategy whatsoever.
In short, with a strategy, you will never find yourself left in the lurch even if something unexpected happens at some time crucial. With all the plans and progress in place, you will be able to answer your audience’s queries and comments, effectively. This, in turn, will show your audience that you care and are happy to have a conversation with them. Thus, justifying it is social media.
- It Allows Better Campaigning
Online campaigns can be complex, challenging, and time-consuming when you are starting from scratch. But, figuring out the little things through strategizing your online presence can ease down the process of setting up and running a campaign.
For example, a newbie business on social media will have a tougher time to convince a social media celebrity to do a recommendation ad or review of their product. However, with a strategy, you will be able to get a prominent presence on social media, thus making it easier to explore more promotional and campaign-related prospects, such as Twitter chats, influencer marketing, cross-platform campaigns, and big-brand partnerships. As your social presence becomes stronger, the number of social assets will also increase. You will be able to squeeze every ounce of potential through these assets to build on the foundation you laid using a social media strategy.
Conclusion
This article guides you through 5 indubitable reasons why your business needs a social media strategy. These reasons are elaborated to provide a clear idea about the importance of a plan when you want to use social media to grow your business. The article begins by briefing you about why social media is important for your business and what a social media strategy is. It also shares some perspective-changing stats that reflect the importance of social media for businesses in the 21st century. It, then, moves forward to how having a strategy to use social media platforms in your business’s favor benefit in the long run.
After reading this article, you should be able to understand why developing a strategy is imperative for your presence on any social media platform.
Jayesh Manshani is a Creative Writer and an SEO expert at Auto Monkey. We provide an original analysis of the latest happenings in the social media industry. Connect with Latest Social Media Trends and News plus tips on Twitter, Facebook and other social tools on the web.