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3 Steps To Add Fuel To Your Social Media Strategy Fire & BoostResults

Your social media strategy is most likely quite complex. You should be posting multiple times per day, in multipleplaces in order to attract the attention of possible customers. It should be like a fire.

After taking the time to build a good fire do you leave it alone and let it go out?

No! You add fuel, be that coal, wood, cardboard, or whatever. You don't do this once either. In order to keep your fireburning nicely you need to consistently add fuel throughout the night.

Social media marketing is the same. No matter if you're flying solo, or are part of a marketing team, there are 3 wordswhich will keep your social efforts burning bright:

Planning, Consistency, and Monitoring

Results only come through planning in advance, consistency via a strong will and powerful work ethic, and monitoringyour results.

In this blog I'll guide you through a 3 step plan where you'll learn how to get better results from social media marketingthrough planning, consistency, and then monitoring...

Why Are We Working On Social Media Marketing?

Before the how must come the why, and in thiscase you need to understand why planning,consistency, and monitoring is going to help yoursocial media marketing efforts.

Social media could consist of many differentchannels (such as YouTube, Facebook, andLinkedIn), requiring different content to be postedeach and every day, from blogs to be written,through to content to be promoted for money.

With so many plates spinning at once, themodern social media marketer or marketing teamneeds to have some way to organise theiractivities, as well as see them through.

Why do you even operate on socialmedia?

First let me ask you why you're operating onsocial media for your business in the first place?

Your social media strategy's purpose is toprovide a link between your business andthe customer, allowing them tocommunicate with you, and enhancingyour relationship through you offeringthem new knowledge. (Tweet this)

This is a link that you don't want to break, and in order to be foremost in yourpotential or current customers' thoughts you need to be where they're going to seeyou, and that's on their favourite social media channels.

Once you're there, you need to be sure that what you're posting is helpful,attractive, and solves their questions and problems. Luckily, you have quite thearsenal to choose from, which leads us nicely into planning what you're postingand getting it seen...

The 3 Step Guide To Getting Better Results From Social Media

1. Planning your activitiesBefore you start posting and sharing different kinds of content you need to know what you want to create and where.

What kinds of social content should I create?

Now you know that you need to be present on your customers' social media channels the next step is todecide what kinds of content you need to create for them in order to keep them informed, solve their problems, andincrease their trust in you enough to lead to a sale.

The fun part starts here, but devising your content is down to your company's strengths. You might create:

A regular blog

Videos

A podcast

E-books

Photographs

Infographics

Slide shows

Each of these kinds of content has their strengths and drawbacks, but because there are many different places thatyou might share social content like blogs, and where you're sure to find potential customers, it's important to have adiverse and interesting 'catalogue' of content going out there.

Which content you're creating is your decision, and I could write a blog about how to create each type mentionedabove (and have in many cases, see them here). But the main thing is to think about what you're trying to achieve:

You're creating varied content in order to inform, attract, or solve problems for your potentialcustomers. By doing so you build trust with them, and give them an opportunity to communicate withyou.

Play to your strengths. If videos are the way to go in order to highlight what you can do, but you don't feel thatwritten content like blogs will help you to do this, then by all means concentrate on a YouTube channel, and postvideos elsewhere too!

Discover where your possible customers are

Which social networks are your potential customers to be found on? The types of networks that they like to use will ofcourse have an effect on the types of content that you're then going to create.

This will take some research, and it's important to remember that you don't need to be active on every social network.

Start by checking if your competitors have pages there. Are they active, what are they posting, are they getting a lot ofpositive reaction to their content? Competitor research in this way can help you refine your own strategy, and figureout if it's worth pouring your marketing efforts into a certain network.

Next, take a look at what kinds of communities or groups the network offers. Are there any for your industry? If so,are they full of new conversations and many fans? If there are, then there is a good opportunity for you to join themand start contributing. If not you could create your own, although progress and results will be a lot slower than if youare contributing to an already vibrant community or group.

If the network you're looking at lacks activity here, then it may be that your kinds of customers might prefer a differentnetwork. For instance, if you're a very formal and technical business, you may find that LinkedIn is more appropriate,whereas if you sell a fun consumer product, you may have more luck on Facebook.

Once you know that potential customers (people who are interested in your industry, products, or services) are on anetwork, you must create a presence there:

Create an official business account

Start contributing to group or community conversations

Be seen there regularly

One of the worst things you can do is create an account on a social network and then not use it. If an interestedpossible customer stumbles across it then not only will they not receive attractive and helpful information, but it willalso look like your business isn't even running!

Now you have your social media accounts set up, you need to post regularly in order to be seen by current andfuture fans. To convert these fans into customers you need to consistently offer them useful content, be that freeadvice, special offers, or information that will make them engage with you.

If you hadn't before, now you (or someone in your company) needs to set aside time each day to look after thesesocial networks. You will:

Publish and schedule new social posts

Check for questions and answer them

See if and where anyone has mentioned you and connect with them

If you now know what to post, and where to post, you're ready to get better results by becoming more consistent.Here's how...

2. Becoming more consistent

Create editorial calendars

Just deciding to 'post content regularly' isn't going to cut it, believe me. You need to map out a schedule for whatyou're posting each day of every month.

Although some of your posts may be relevant shared content which is relatively quick to find, you'll need to createmuch of it yourselves, and this could take several hours per piece (for example, a complicated blog post could takeme 3 or 4 hours to research and write).

Without a plan you're going to quickly get bogged down, fall behind, or even forget to create some of it!

Depending on your team's size you will be able to create a different amount of content, but having a deadline will helpyou to make sure that enough gets done. Start by planning an achievable amount of content and posts to bepublished per network per month.

I find that having 2 calendars, one for content creation, and one for social publishing, works well:

1. Content Creation: You'll be creating as much relevant content as possible, as this is what your potentialcustomers and followers will be attracted by, and which helps them out in some way.At the beginning of each month, look at each week day by day and decide on what you're going to create andwhen.For instance, you may decide that each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday you will publish a blog. At this pointyou can also commit to what kind of blog it is that you'll be creating on these days. In this way you are sendingout a consistent message to readers in that they'll know that each Friday, for instance, they can expect a blogon a certain type of topic.You may also create other things like podcasts or infographics on certain days. If so, add them to the calendar.This commitment means that you, and any other team members, know what is meant to be created and when.The first month may be tough, but after this you'll find that you're starting to get ahead of your schedule, andwill be creating content for weeks, or even months, in advance!

2. Social Publishing: Now you're creating content you need to share it socially, so you can make a calendaroutlining how many posts per day you are going to share per social network.Some of these posts will be your content, whereas others will be you sharing relevant material from othersources, such as industry specific news, infographics, images, etc.Typically you'll want to share your content as soon as it goes live, so if you know that you're publsihing a newblog each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, then you can plan to publish those on your social network pageson those days.You can also schedule re-posting older content periodically, as this puts it in front of the eyes of new followerswho may not have sen it first time round.

At the end of each month you should be thinking about what is going into next month's calendar. The items that I havementioned above for content creation are the smaller 'regular' pieces, but it may be that you are also working on otherlarger projects such as writing an E-Book, or creating a video. Since these may take several days, or even weeks, tocreate you need to add these in advance to your calendar as well, so you're tracking when they're supposed to befinished, and can publish them socially too if appropriate.

By having the regular work, such as consistently writing a blog on certain days, you eliminate the circumstance whereyou or someone else may get to the office and wonder: "What am I going to do today?" And you'll also be catering forlarger side-projects that take longer in amongst this structure.

Which Calendar Can I Use?

Honestly, there are a plethora of calendar apps and software out there that will do the job perfectly. However the oneproviso I would give is that, unless it's only you working on social media, that the calendars must be collaborativesoftware (in that everyone can use the same one, access it from their own PC, and have version control where theywill see any new updates).

My suggestions would be:

Google Calendar (FREE)

Basecamp (Paid & more than just a calendar)

Now you know both what to create and publish, and when to do so, and are doing it consistently thanks to youreditorial calendars, but how do you know if you're having any success? This is where monitoring comes into play...

3. Monitoring your results

Knowing what to create and doing it consistently is excellent, and if you're doing this then you're on the right lines tohaving a great social media strategy, however what you're doing will evolve over time as you monitor its results.

Monitoring your results is useful, because how can you know if what you're doing or the content you're creating is asuccess if you don't know its effect?

Traffic & Engagement

You should be using software like Google Analytics or Hubspot to monitor your online results. They both offer a lotmore than simply information on your social media marketing efforts, but in this case you will need to check weeklyand monthly:

Traffic from social referral sources

Which social networks provide the most traffic

Which posts are most popular in terms of likes and shares**(Either use the network's analytics, such as Facebook's page insights, or manually scan your page by eye.Keeping results in a spreadsheet may help you to compare trends between post types.)

Below you can see an example of a referral traffic sources screen from Google analytics:

This is worth checking frequently, as it'simportant to know where your traffic iscoming from outside of your own website.

It's probably likely that the bulk of it willcome from social media networks that youare active on, however there willsometimes be new referral sites that cangive you an idea of somewhere else thatyou could be sharing your content. Forinstance, if you find that a particular blog,or industry forum has sent traffic to you,you should consider checking whichcontent got shared there in order to do this,and then share more of the same kinds ofcontent there in future. However, withoutchecking this potentially rich vein of trafficwould have escaped your detection!

As with anything in life, you should aim to do more of what is successful, and less of what is not working out as well.

In general you want more social networks to be sending more people through to you via your content, as the morepeople who see it, the more likely they are to become customers down the line.

Time & Post Frequency

You can also monitor the times and frequency that you're posting content on your social networks:

Is one time of day more popular than another in terms of your fans' engagement? Focus on that time!

Do you find that your fans are reacting better to less posts? Try reducing the number of times you're posting perday.

Want to test if posting more will get you more engagement and traffic? Try it out for a time, and then check theresults*. Is it working? If yes, amend your posting schedule to include another post. *(If you see a rise in traffic and / or engagement from the extra post, but without too many more peopleunsubscribing from your networks or marking the posts as spam, then you can consider the test to besuccessful)

Types Of Content & Posts

You should be creating a diverse mix of content, but it may be that one or two kinds seem to resonate much betterwith your audience. If that's the case then concentrate on those, it's no problem at all to cast aside content which isn'tworking.

For example, perhaps you used to create and share 3 blogs per week, but you tested replacing one with a newpodcast. You found that the podcast performed better than the blogs in terms of traffic to your site and likes, shares,etc.

You can assume that podcasting is something that your followers enjoy, and so you can now schedule in a regularpodcast and replace a blog!

If you didn't check on the efficacy of the podcast, how would you know that it was worthwhile continuing to create itinstead of the blog?

The same goes for individual social posts. It may be that you have more success with a certain kind of post. You cancheck this using each page's analytics, such as Facebook's insights again, or by eye.

Below you can see how easy it is to filter Facebook insights to see which posts have performed best:

You can see if videos, for instance, outperform image shares. If that's the case, then perhaps next month you couldpost more videos, and less images.

Using Facebook insights in this way is especially important if Facebook is an important social channel for you, as itwill provide a barometer to what kinds of posts (and also posting times) are working well with your audience whichyou can follow across all of your social networks (although you should also check them individually too).

Competitor Research

When monitoring, you should also be monitoring other social media posts, such as those produced by yourcompetitors.

By checking their pages you're turning spy and getting free advice on how to get better results from social media, asyou can see what they are doing well and getting results from, and what is not working.

If they're getting good results from something that you're not doing then maybe it's time that you considered addingthis to your social strategy?

Read here to learn 6 HELPFUL THINGS YOUR COMPETITORS' SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING SHOWS YOU .

Now Let's Get To Work

If you've made it this far then I think you're interested in proceeding correctly, so let's review the three steps that youneed to follow in order to boost the results of your social media strategy.

1. Plan your activities: Decide what content to create, where to post it, and how often to do so.

2. Become more consistent: Know in advance what is happening and when by implementing an editorialcalendar.

3. Monitor your results: Hone your social media efforts by monitoring traffic sources and post engagement, ifyour post frequency and timing is right, and if you're creating the right kinds of content.

Remember, your aim is to use social media as a bridge between your company and your possible customers. Byproducing free, useful, and attractive content, and sharing it in the right places, you'll build up a following who trust youand enjoy your offerings because you're helping to answer their questions, make their lives easier, or solve theirproblems..

Of course these people are then more likely to be receptive to your advertisements and promotions and becomecustomers, buying your services or products which take them the extra mile towards making things 'better.'

How do you keep your social media work buzzing? Do you do all of these activities? Are there any additional tips thatyou would add in order to keep things healthy? Let us know by leaving them as a comment!

Arranging your social media strategy can be difficult, so if you need help implementing these three steps in order toget better results from social media efforts please click below to get a FREE inbound marketing consultation fromOxygen 2.0 where we will advise you on how to proceed: