Social Media Marketing Strategy : Back to Basics
Do you know that people use their phones 150 times a day! Can you guess why? Average time spent on social media by a person is more than 2 hours a day. This is the reason for the increasing popularity of Social Media Marketing. Networking sites are providing a great opportunity to the companies to market their products or services.
Social Media Marketing is an absolutely essential process to build your brand image. Of course, you would be already aware of that. The thing you may not know is whether you need to have a presence on every social media platform or not ?
So, here we are discussing the Basic strategy to be followed to leverage social media marketing to its best.
But before you go for strategic planning of using social media marketing, you have to perform external and internal environment analysis.You have to get a thorough knowledge of the preferences and behavior of your target audience. You should also observe your competitors. Then select the right strategy for you.
The most important decision in your social media marketing campaign is to decide between these two strategies.
Generic strategy
Niche social media strategy
This means either you can target every social media platform to have your presence everywhere or a particular networking site at a time. Let us critically analyze them and know which one is the best suited for your business growth.
Generic strategy
This strategy is based on the idea of ‘’.
People have so many different personalities. Some people love reading blogs, some likes photos, some prefer to watch videos. That is why there so are many social media platforms. Each of them offers a unique experience to users.
If you want to make your presence on every platform, this is the strategy for you. It is definitely very much time-consuming process but it offers great benefits too.
Being everywhere can create synergies for you. More people will know about you and you will be promoted through word of mouth.
Eventually, You can reach the people who use multiple social media platforms. For big companies, it is beneficial to create more publicity and brand awareness.
It is a great strategy especially in case of big companies. Required time and resources would be more in this case but so will be the ROI.
Specific strategy
Stop setting goals. Goals are pure fantasy unless you have a specific plan to achieve them.
If you choose this strategy, you will pick one or two specific niche social media platforms. You do not go to other platforms unless you have mastered your target social media network. The advocates of this strategy say that there is no point of wandering around on every platform. If you do not have a particular aim, your efforts are vague. Quality is more important than quantity. Being specific can provide great advantages like :
If you decide a particular network say facebook, you would be more concentrated. You can understand your audience better. Then after having a good presence, you can move to another platform.
You can quickly master a specific platform as you are more focused and devoted to it.
Having a strong presence on one network will support you on other networks too in future.
You can learn so much from a single platform having single focused area.
You will be able to provide useful content to the people who actually need it. This will also increase your conversion rate.
You can be very responsive to your audience and understand their needs and preferences better.
If you are running a small business or startup, this is the best strategy for you. There are fewer requirements for time and resources in this strategy. Moreover, you will be able to deliver the quality information and attract a loyal audience.
Conclusion
You have seen an overview of both the strategies. Now the decision is up to you to choose the best method as per your needs.
Still confused? Just find out the preferences of your target audience and you will get the answer by yourself. But Before deciding the strategy, do the environmental scanning. Find out what purpose and resources you have and then take your decision.
Our advice is target a specific social media network and then move to other ones. But if the company is large enough and can afford to target various networking sites at a time, then obviously go for the generic one. Whichever method you choose, you will definitely increase your brand awareness.
“You can never go wrong by investing in communities and the human beings within them.” – Pam Moore
