Social media distribution is a key piece of any successful publisher’s endeavors. However, social publishing can seem like an endless time and resource suck. Elevating social media to a strategic process can be a win across the board.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Successful publishers re-envision social media as a strategic initiative to drive revenue, audience, and engagement goals.
This is more important than ever, as platforms are shifting to short-form videos and trying to capture a younger audience. Media companies may need to rethink their content strategies and find new ways to reach their audience.
This kind of strategic redirection is critical for success in today’s media world. But, too often, social media teams get stuck in the weeds of execution. The mechanics of preparing posts and distributing them can consume most of the available hours with unreliable success.
Elevating social media strategy
Moving to a strategic view of social media requires three things. First, your social media team should have clear goals. The ultimate goal of every company must ultimately be revenue, but which social media efforts pay off? Aside from increasing revenue, your goals may include audience building, engagement, and building traffic to owned and operated properties.
Second, your social media team must understand which activities deliver those goals. Content selection and post creation are the foundation of your online presence. Without this kind of visibility, it’s impossible to prioritize efforts and avoid wasting time and resources.
Finally, it isn’t easy to execute a strategic vision without automation. Automation technology helps free your social media team from the repetitive tasks of identifying content for social distribution. It also saves time preparing posts for different channels and scheduling them using a best-guess approach.
Research target audience
Before creating content, it’s important to first research your target audience by looking at demographic data from social media, your website, and customer surveys and/or polls. In Google Analytics and your social media analytic tools, you can see your audience’s gender, age, location, interests, and many more things, which can help shape what kind of content you write. Understanding your target audience will also help you better understand how to communicate with them through your content.
Audit content
Auditing your content is important to ensure that you reach your target audience. Taking time to analyze the analytics of your content, such as website traffic, engagement rates, and likes/shares can assist you in making data-driven changes. Identifying trends in successful posts will help you craft more creative, engaging content for your target audience. Auditing your content gives you the insight needed to optimize its effectiveness to reach your target audience’s maximum potential. Remember that an effective audit requires regular analysis because trends will continually change, and you must keep up with them to ensure your content is relevant.
True Anthem automatically indexes, scores, segments, and predicts the success of website content identifying the most likely to perform best. Our platform also allows users to tailor post attributes for each social platform quickly, and then we optimize the distribution of those posts.
This kind of functionality frees the social media team to identify and execute more strategic activities, whether adding or increasing video capabilities or other important directions.
Create a social media content calendar
To ensure that your posts reach your target audience on the right platforms, it’s essential to have a solid social media content calendar in place to streamline the process of posting. A content calendar allows you to stay organized by planning out the topics, themes, posting times and dates, hashtags, visuals, etc., for each post ahead of time. With the right amount of organization, a content calendar can quickly become one of your most valuable tools in managing successful social media campaigns.
Emojis
Emojis have become increasingly popular over the last few years and are now an integral part of communication. With their ability to add character and spice up copy or visuals, it’s no wonder why emojis are widely used to express emotion and creativity on social media, adding an extra layer of engagement for users when browsing through content.
Share quality visual content
People are more likely to share content when it includes visuals. The social networks we use every day now feature photos, GIFs, videos, memes, and other types of creative content, which provide a great opportunity for brands to engage with their target audience. With the right strategy in place, businesses can reach thousands of eyes quickly and effectively by taking advantage of our natural inclination toward imagery.
Are you ready to free hours from scheduling so you and your team can start focusing on strategic initiatives? Elevating your social media strategy doesn’t have to be daunting. Let us show you how True Anthem can drive more traffic, increase revenues and spend less time doing it.
