Social Media

Problem: How to create an effective and measurable Social Media Plan?

Learning objectives:
1. How to make a Social Media plan?
2. How to implement a Social Media plan?
3. How to measure a Social Media plan?

1. How to make a Social Media plan?

Definition:

A social media marketing plan is the summary of everything you plan to do and hope to achieve for your business using social networks. This plan should include an audit of where your accounts are today, goals for where you want them to be in the near future, and all the tools you want to use to get there.

There are 6 steps:

1. Set your social media goals --> SMART goals

2. Conduct a social media audit

3. Create/ improve your social media accounts

4. Get social media inspiration from industry leaders, competitors, clients

5. Create a content plan and editorial calendar

6. Test, evaluate and adjust your social media marketing plan

Overview about different social media channels and their usage. Source: Frankly Communications 2014.

In order to find the right social media platform that suits the purpose of you company it is essential to know the advantages and disadvantages of each platform. This illustrations compares the most used social media channels according to their users and advantages/ disadvantes.

Choosing the right social media platform. Source: accion.org

According to accion, the first step is to identify the target audience. Afterwards, the goals need to be set. One goal of course is to increase sales but there are goals that are more related to social media in particular such as driving brand recognition or increasing customer support. The last step is to find your audience. Which means to find out which social media platform they use and how active they are.

2. How to implement a Social Media plan?

Social Media Strategy, source: Smiciklas 2013

3. How to measure a Social Media plan?

There are many different tools that can measure the outcome of a firm's social media activities. In the following I will present a few of these tools:

• Facebook insights: provides access to daily active users, monthly active users, daily new likes, daily interactions (comments, posts, likes), geographic location of your visitors, etc.
• Google analytics: provides rich insights into your site traffic and marketing effectiveness for free. Allows you to create better-targeted ads, measures your engagement goals.
• YouTube insights: shows detailed statistics about your audience. Helps to analyze your marketing efforts and to determine how to optimize your campaigns.
• Twtrland: runs reports, discover the top influencers, analyzes your Twitter activities
• Likealyzer.com: Analyzes your Facebook page and gives you advice about how to optimize it
• socialbakers.com

Keywords: Strategy, Channels, target group, measurement, tracking, platforms

Sources:

Accion. 2015. Choosing the Right Social Media Platform for Your Business. URL: http://us.accion.org/business-resources/articles-videos/choosing-right-social-media-platform-your-business. Accessed: 14.03.2016.

LePage, E. 2014. How To Create A Social Media Marketing Plan In 6 Steps. URL: https://blog.hootsuite.com/how-to-create-a-social-media-marketing-plan/. Accessed: 14.03.2016.

Smiciklas, M. 2013. 8 Step Social Media Strategy. URL: https://www.socialmediaexplorer.com/social-media-marketing/8-step-social-media-strategy-infographic/. Accessed: 17.03.2016

Socialbrite.org. (n.d.). 10 free metrics tools for actionable analytics. URL: http://socialbrite.s3.amazonaws.com/10-free-metrics-tools.pdf. Accessed: 14.03.2016.