At Brand Strides, we know how important social media is to a brand’s success. The growth of social media and the never-ending developments can make these platforms hard to keep track of. As users continue to skyrocket on many different platforms, it is important for companies to keep track of trends and find ways to manage their social media platforms effectively. Let’s explore the steps and tools your company can use to effectively and efficiently monitor your social media pages.
Step 1: Set Goals
Setting goals is the most important step in developing your social media strategy. These goals will be used as a “backboard” and a way to measure if your pages are accomplishing what they are supposed to be. To have metrics to measure against, it is important to create numerical goals for engagement, follower count, and overall traffic. There are many platforms you can use to do so, including the ones mentioned below.
- Hootsuite Insights: This platform allows you to set goals for growth while simultaneously tracking your page’s growth towards these goals. While allowing you to monitor engagement and traffic, this platform also suggests ways of improvement.
- Google Analytics: This platform provides detailed numerical data that allows you to find opportunities for growth and improvement based on your company’s overall goals.
- Sprout Social: This platform has a complete social media management program that can help monitor social media platform performance against the goals set at the beginning of the plan.
Step 2: Develop a Content Strategy
Once goals are created, it is important to develop a strategy to reach your target audience and effectively meet the goals created in step one. You should research your target audience’s lifestyle, needs, and demographics to understand how to reach them. Once you do this, it is important to determine what platforms can be best used to capture their attention. Here are some tools to help you develop a strategy and maintain a schedule and calendar to stay organized.
- BuzzSumo: This tool allows you to research and identify the most engaging content in the industry surrounding your company. You can also track your competitors and monitor your performance compared to them.
- SEMrush: This tool allows you to research keywords and competitors and find ideas for content based on your social media strategy.
- CoSchedule Headline Analyzer: This tool helps create headlines that drive traffic and engagement by analyzing the features of your headlines.
- Buffer: This free tool allows you to schedule your content and measure your performance against others in the industry.
- Google Trends: This tool allows you to explore trending topics and keywords that are important for your industry and the overall sector.
Step 3: Build a Strong Brand Identity
Building a strong identity is key to consistent messaging and information given to your target audience. This identity should be showcased and consistent throughout all social media platforms that are utilized in your campaign. It is important to create a brand voice that complements the images and visuals you are sharing with your audience. Many tools can help create an overall brand identity and theme for your social media platforms.
- Canva: This tool has many templates and tools to help create a consistent graphic design theme and visually appealing social media strategy that is unique from competitors.
- Adobe Spark: This tool allows you to create attention-grabbing videos, graphics, and websites to keep your audience engaged.
- BrandMentions: This tool helps monitor and manage your brand’s reputation. It allows you to track and monitor negative feedback and comments while ensuring consistency in your brand’s overall messaging.
Step 4: Engaging with Your Audience
Once your identity is created, it’s important to be able to interact with your audience and facilitate a social media relationship that translates into business relationships. This will help to establish a sense of community and create a reputation that your brand values what their customers have to say. Here are some tools to engage with your audience:
- Hootsuite Insights: This tool allows you to track your engagement and performance. It allows you to monitor consumer responses to your pages in all aspects.
- Agorapulse: With this tool, you can schedule, publish, and evaluate your performance to improve your digital capabilities.
- Buffer: This platform allows you to directly respond to your audience through their page.
- BuzzSumo: This tool helps to identify influencers and thought leaders in your industry.
- Zoho Social: This tool allows you to schedule and post content while monitoring consumer responses.
Step 5: Measuring and Analyzing Results
It is important to go back through and compare your social media performance to the goals that were set in step one. You should maximize the effectiveness of your strategies while staying on budget and basing it on the strategies and goals that were created throughout this process.
- Google Analytics: Website traffic, conversion rates, and key goals to contribute to the growth of social media platforms
- Buffer: Offers free tools to track and measure your performance compared to goals
- Hootsuite Insights: Helps provide tools to track overall performance
- SEMrush: Tracks competitor's performance alongside your own to compare
- Sprout Social: Helps track, analyze, and optimize social media strategies
Conclusion
To summarize, it is important to have a consistent strategy that makes your brand easily recognizable to your target audience. You should constantly monitor your initial goals and compare them to the overall actual performance your social media channels have year to year. Brand Strides understands the importance of social media success. Through these platforms and consistently monitoring goals compared to actual performance, your company can set themselves up for success and convey a consistent brand message to your consumers.
