How to Create a Social Media Marketing Strategy From Scratch

This post originally published on July 16, 2014. We’ve updated it here with new research and stats and a cool new infographic.

When I went rock climbing for the first time, I had no idea what I was doing. My friends and I were complete newbies about ropes and rappelling and every other bit of jargon and technique that goes with climbing. We saw others doing it spectacularly well. We were thrilled at the thought of reaching the top of the climbing wall; we had no idea how to get there.

I’d imagine that a social media marketing strategy could feel the same way.

If you’re starting from square one, it might feel equal parts thrilling and overwhelming. You know what you want to do and why. You can see that others have climbed the social media mountain; you’ve got few ideas how to get there yourself.

It’d help to have a plan.

We’ve shared before about different parts of a social media strategy—the data and research and personal experience behind what works on social media.

Now we’re pleased to put it all into a cohesive, step-by-step blueprint that you can use to get started. If you need a social media marketing plan, start here.

Social Media Marketing Plan

Starting at the ground floor and building up, here is our overview of how to create a social media marketing plan from scratch.

I like to think of this plan like a road trip. Start out by pointing yourself in the right direction, then choose the way you’re going to get there, check in regularly to make sure you’re on track, and have some fun along the way.

Step 1: Choose your social networks

Step 2: Fill out your profiles completely

Step 3: Find your voice and tone

Step 4: Pick your posting strategy

Step 5: Analyze and test

Step 6: Automate and engage

Step 1: Which social media sites you should use

Social media is as homogenous from network to network as soda pop is from brand to brand. Sure, it’s all social media, but Google+ and Twitter might as well be Mountain Dew and Pepsi. Each network is unique, with its own best practices, own style, and own audience.

You should choose the social networks that best fit your strategy and the goals you want to achieve on social media.

You don’t have to be on them all—just the ones that matter to you and your audience.

Some things to consider that can help you choose not only which social networks to try but also how many to try.

Audience – Where do your potential customers hang out? Which social network has the right demographics?

Time – How much time can you devote to a social network? Plan on at least an hour per day per social network, at least at the start. (Once you get going, tools like Buffer can help you save a bit of time.)

Resources – What personnel and skills do you have to work with? Social networks like Facebook emphasize quality content. Visual social networks like Pinterest and Instagram require images and videos. Do you have the resources to create what’s needed?

For the first part of this decision, you can reference the audience research and demographics from surveys like those conducted by Pew Research. For instance, Pew has complete data, collected last year, of the demographics for Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. Here is a side-by-side comparison of the major social media platforms’ user demographics.

For Snapchat’s user demographics, you can check out this “Who’s on Snapchat, anyway?” blog post by Snapchat.

Step 2: Fill out your profiles completely

One of our monthly checks here at Buffer is to visit each of our social media profiles and make sure that our profile photos, cover photos, bio, and profile info are up-to-date and complete. It’s a key part to our social media audit. A completed profile shows professionalism, cohesive branding, and a signal to visitors that you’re serious about engaging.

Profiles will require two parts: visuals and text.

For visuals, we aim for consistency and familiarity with the visuals we use on social media. Our profile photo on Instagram matches our profile photo on Facebook. Our cover photo on Twitter is similar to our cover on LinkedIn.

To create these images, you can consult a social media image size chart that will show you the exact breakdown of dimensions for each photo on each network. For an even easier time of it, you can use a tool like Crello or Canva, which comes with prebuilt templates that set the proper sizes for you.

For text, your main area to customize is the bio/info section. Creating a professional social media bio can be broken down into six simple rules.

1. Show, don’t tell: “What have I done” often works better than “Who I am”
2. Tailor your keywords to your audience
3. Keep language fresh; avoid buzzwords
4. Answer the question of your potential followers: “What’s in it for me?”
5. Be personal and personable
6. Revisit often

Step 3: Find your marketing voice and tone

The temptation at this point might be to jump right in and start sharing. Just one more step before you do. Your foray into social media will be more focused and more on point if you come up with a voice and tone for your content right off the bat.

To do so, you could spend time coming up with marketing personas and debating the finer points of your mission statement and customer base. These are all well and good. But for a social media marketing plan just getting off the ground, you can make this process a bit easier.

Start with questions like these:

• If your brand was a person, what kind of personality would it have?
• If your brand was a person, what’s their relationship to the consumer? (a coach, friend, teacher, dad, etc)
• Describe in adjectives what your company’s personality is not.
• Are there any companies that have a similar personality to yours? Why are they similar?
• How do you want your customers to think about your company?

At the end of this exercise, you should end up with a handful of adjectives that describe the voice and tone of your marketing. Consider this to keep you on track:

Voice is the mission statement; tone is the implementation of that mission.

MailChimp has created a standalone website simply for its voice and tone. Here’s an example of how they implement these qualities into their communication:

Cultivate a voice that delights your customers, then your customers will be thrilled to spread the love about you.

Step 4: Pick your posting strategy

What’s the ideal amount to post per day? How often should you post? When should you post? What should you post? The solid gold, ironclad answer for questions like these is:

It depends.

So much of the social media experience is about your individual audience and niche. What works for you might not work for me, and you never know until you try (we’ll get to trying in step five).

That being said, there is some pretty good data and insight about where to start. Here’s what we’ve found to be good jumping off points.

What should you be posting?

Videos are ideal for engagement.

The push toward video content has plenty of anecdotal evidence—as you browse your Facebook News Feed and Twitter timeline, you’re likely to see videos all over. There’s data to back up this trend: Videos posts get more views, shares, and Likes than any other type of post. And it’s not even close.

On Facebook, video posts get higher average engagement than link posts or image posts, according to BuzzSumo who analyzed 68 million Facebook posts.

On Twitter, videos are six times more likely to be retweeted than photos and three times more likely to be retweeted than GIFs, according to Twitter.

If you want to get started on creating social videos, here’s our video marketing guide on creating epic content on Facebook, Twitter, and more.

The 4:1 Strategy

Now that you know what works, you can place these different types of updates into a consistent strategy. One of my favorite systems is the one used by Buffer’s co-founder Joel Gascoigne. It works like this:

1. Start with the basic six types of updates we all post: Links, videos, images, quotes, reshares, plain-text updates
2. Choose a “staple” update, a single type that will make up the majority of your shares
3. Create a 4:1 ratio of sharing: for every four “staple” updates, publish one different type for variety

This way your followers know what to expect from you, and you can hone your sharing to a specific type, making it easier to perfect and to experiment.

(Note: You might not want to post the exact same updates across each of your social networks. Consider composing your updates in a unique way to complement each network’s own best practices, culture, and language.)

How often should you be posting?

There’s been a lot of interesting data out there about how often to post to social media. Some of the factors that might impact your specific sharing frequency may include your industry, your reach, your resources, and the quality of your updates. The social network you’re using will have its own best practices, too.

If people love your updates, you can typically always get away with posting more.

For a specific number, here’re some guidelines we’ve put together based on some really helpful research into how often to post to social media.

• Facebook – Once or twice per day
• Instagram – Once or twice per day
• Instagram Stories – Eight to 16 Stories, twice per week
• Twitter – Three to ten times per day
• LinkedIn – Once or twice per day
• Pinterest – Five to ten times per day
• Snapchat – Five to 20 times per week

When should you be posting?

There are many neat tools to show you the best time of day to post to Facebook, Twitter, and more. These tools look at your followers and your history of posts to see when your audience is online and when historically have been your best times to share.

So what’s someone to do who’s just starting out on these social networks, with no audience and no history?

Again, this is where best practices come in. Perhaps the most helpful (and adorable) infographic I’ve seen about timing comes from SumAll, which compiled timing research from sites like Visual.ly, Search Engine Watch, and Social Media Today to create its awesome visual. Here’s an overview of what they found in terms of timing (all times are Eastern Time).

• Twitter – 1-3pm weekdays
• Facebook – 1-4pm and 2-5pm weekdays
• LinkedIn – 7-8:30am and 5-6pm Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday
• Tumblr – 7-10pm weekdays and 4pm on Fridays
• Instagram – 5-6pm weekdays and 8pm on Mondays with a sweet spot at 6pm
• Pinterest – 2-4pm and 8-11pm weekdays with weekends being the best
• Google+ – 9-11am weekdays

I would recommend experimenting with these times (in your local time) and a few randomly-picked times as you’re starting out.

Once you have been posting a while, you can use your own data and tools like Facebook Insights, Instagram Insights, and Followerwonk to find your brand’s best time to post and refine your posting strategy.

Step 5: Analyze, test, and iterate

Remember how we talked about social media sharing being a very individual, specific endeavor? Your stats will likely start to bear this out.

The more you post, the more you’ll discover which content, timing, and frequency is right for you.

How will you know? It’s best to get a social media analytics tool. Most major social networks will have basic analytics built into the site; it’s just a little easier to seek and find this information from an all-encompassing dashboard.

These tools (I’ll use Buffer’s analytics as an example) can show you a breakdown of how each post performed in the important areas of views, clicks, shares, Likes, and comments.

Which social media stats are best? We’ve gained some insight from looking at each of these main statistics and the composite engagement statistic on a per-post basis. The resulting stat gives us a great look, over time, of how our social media content tends to perform, and we can then test and iterate from there.

Here’s one way to analyze your performance.

Set a benchmark. After two weeks or a month of sharing, you can go back through your stats and find the average number of clicks, shares, likes, and comments per post. This’ll be your benchmark going forward. You can come back and update this number at any time as your following and influence grow.

Test something new. We’re open to testing just about anything at Buffer. We’re in the midst of some tests right now on our Facebook account. Do Facebook Live videos get more views than non-live videos? Does the video length matter? We’ll often hear about someone’s new strategy or get a new idea and then test right away.

Did it work? Check the stats from your test versus the stats of your benchmark. If your test performed well, then you can implement the changes into your regular strategy. And once your test is over, test something new!

Step 6: Automate, engage, and listen

The final piece of a social media marketing plan involves having a system you can follow to help you stay on top of updates and engage with your community.

To start with, automate posting of your social media content.

Tools like Buffer allow you to create all the content that you want to, all at once, and then place everything into a queue to be sent out according to whatever schedule you choose. Automation is the secret weapon for consistently excellent sharing, day after day.

Your plan doesn’t end with automation, though. Social media requires engagement, too.

When people talk to you, talk back. Set aside time during your day to follow up with conversations that are happening on social media. These are conversations with potential customers, references, friends, and colleagues. They’re too important to ignore.

One way to stay up on all the conversations that are happening around you and your company is to create a system for listening and engaging. Tools like Buffer Reply and Mention will collect all social media mentions and comments on your posts in a single place, where you can quickly reply your followers.

What would you share with someone new to social media?

Coming up with a social media marketing plan is a great step toward diving in to social. If social media looks thrilling and overwhelming all at once, start with a plan. Once you see the blueprint in front of you, it’s a little easier to see what lies ahead.

1. Pick your networks
2. Fill out your info
3. Find your voice
4. Choose your strategy
5. Analyze and test
6. Automate and engage

Bingo!

How did you develop your social media strategy? I’d love to keep the conversation going in the comments. If you know someone who could use this, feel free to pass this along. If you can use it yourself, let me know how it goes!

Want more social media tips? Take our free email course!

I’ve put together a list of 25 practical social media strategies that work for us here at Buffer—and I’d love to share them with you via email.

Join here

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This post originally published on July 16, 2014. We’ve updated it with new research, statistics, and a cool new infographic on September 2017.

Image sources: Will Scullin, MailChimp, Crello, SumAll, and Pew Research

source https://blog.bufferapp.com/social-media-marketing-plan

Post Less, Boost Top Posts, and More: 14 Ways to Increase Your Facebook Page Engagement

Engagement on Facebook Pages has fallen by 70 percent since the start of 2017, according to BuzzSumo who analyzed over 880 million Facebook posts by brands and publishers.

As a social media marketer, it is worrying to see these trends.

But we feel there are ways we can combat this organic reach decline on Facebook and we’d love to share some strategies with you.

In this post, we’ll share 14 straightforward ways to increase your Facebook Page engagement — many of which are proven and have worked for us. 

14 ways to increase your Facebook engagement

Starting a Facebook Page might be easy but with the falling organic reach and engagement, growing a Facebook Page can be challenging.

Here are the 14 tactics you can try today to increase your Facebook Page engagement:

1. Post less
2. Post when your fans are online
3. Create specifically for Facebook
4. Try videos
5. Go live
6. Share curated content
7. Ask for opinions
8. Boost your top posts
9. Recycle your top posts
10. Watch other Facebook Pages
11. Experiment with new content
12. Reply comments
13. Host giveaways (occasionally)
14. Create a linked Facebook Group

Let’s dive in!

1. Post less

Posting less grew our reach and engagement by three times.

But the main reason for the growth wasn’t just because we were posting less. It’s because posting less allowed us to…

focus on quality instead of quantity.

We were able to share the best content every day when we post only once or twice a day. When we were posting four to five times a day, we struggled to consistently find so much great content to share.

If you are a solo social media manager or a small business owner who handles your own social media, you might have experienced this before. Finding great content takes time, and you don’t always have the time to do that.

That said, if you are able to maintain the quality of your content while posting many times a day, don’t feel that you have to change your strategy. A few of our readers post more than 10 times a day to their Facebook Page and have found great success.

2. Post when your fans are online

We used to believe that there’s a universal best time to post on Facebook: early afternoon.

But not anymore.

We now believe that every brand has its own perfect time(s) to post. That’s because the best time to post depends on several factors that are specific to each brand: What industry are you in? Where is your audience based? When do your followers use Facebook?

A scientific way to find your best time to post is to look at your own data.

In your Facebook Page Insights, under the Post tab, you get data about when your Facebook Page fans are online for each day of the week.

Using your data, you can make educated guesses of your best posting time. I would recommend experimenting with times during both the peak and non-peak hours to see which works better for your brand.

3. Create specifically for Facebook

What works on Instagram or Twitter might not always work on Facebook. For example, hashtags are great on Instagram and GIFs are great on Twitter but both less so on Facebook.

It’s best to create your Facebook posts specifically for your Facebook Page.

With Buffer, you can easily customize your social media post for each platform when sharing to multiple platforms at once. You can even go one step further by customizing your article headline for your Facebook post.

If you would like to give this a go, we would love for you to try Buffer for Business and experience the difference.

4. Try videos

If you’re wondering how to craft your Facebook posts, we think you should try videos.

From what we have seen this year, videos perform best on Facebook in terms of reach and engagement.

The BuzzSumo study mentioned above also found that “videos now gain twice the level of engagement of other post formats on average”.

Here are three more tips to help you get the most out of your videos:

• Upload your videos onto Facebook: Videos uploaded onto Facebook have, on average, 110 percent higher engagement rate and 478 percent higher share rate than YouTube links, according to a quintly study of six million Facebook posts.
• Experiment with square videos: After running $1,500 worth of experiments, we found that our square videos received higher average views, engagement, and completion rate than our landscape videos, especially on mobile devices.
• Add captions: When studying over 500 Facebook Pages and 12,000 Facebook videos, Locowise found that 93 percent of video views happened without sound.

5. Go live

Facebook has also been pushing their Live videos a lot in this past year.

They tweaked their algorithm to rank live videos higher when they are live than when they are no longer live. Facebook reported that “People spend more than 3x more time watching a Facebook Live video on average compared to a video that’s no longer live” and “people comment more than 10 times more on Facebook Live videos than on regular videos”.

For our #impactofsocial celebration, we hosted five Facebook Live sessions, which received about 4,000 views and 30 comments on average.

Here’s a bonus: Your followers might be more likely to check out your content.

Social Media Examiner noticed that when they went live more often, their non-live content received more exposure. Their founder and CEO, Michael Stelzner, believes that when they go live, their fans are exposed to their brand even if they don’t watch the live video. That might have subtly encouraged them to check out Social Media Examiner’s Facebook Page.

To help you get started with Facebook Live videos, here are some ideas you can try:

• Share behind-the-scenes of an event, your work processes, or your office
• Host a Question-and-Answer or Ask-Me-Anything session
• Interview industry experts using a software like BeLive
• Explain or demonstrate how to do something
• Discuss breaking news
• Share weekly tips

6. Share curated content

It might feel weird sharing other brands’ content. That’s how we felt initially. But after experimenting with sharing high-quality curated content, the results changed our mind.

By sharing top-performing posts from sites like Techcrunch, Inc., and Quartz, we were able to reach a much bigger audience. For example, our recent 10 curated content reached 113,000 people on average.

We had less than 100,000 Facebook Page Likes until recently.

This helped us grow our Facebook Page, allowing us to share our own content with more people. Since the start of this year, our Facebook Page Likes have grown from about 79,000 to 100,000.

There are two types of curated content you can share:

• Third-party content from other brands
• User-generated content from your customers

We mostly share content from other brands on our Facebook Page as that type of content resonates with our Facebook Page followers. Once in a while, we also share user-generated content from our community (which works amazingly on our Instagram account) on our Facebook Page. They tend to perform well, too.

7. Ask for opinions

It might be obvious that people comment when they have something to say. But sometimes, we don’t offer them a chance to say anything!

Asking questions is a good way to offer our followers a chance to share their thoughts.

A practice I like is to share relevant news or blog post and ask our followers for their opinions. What to share might vary depending on your audience. If you have a professional audience, you might want to share industry news or articles. If you are a lifestyle brand, you might choose to share lifestyle news instead.

Here’s a recent example where we asked our followers for their thoughts on a thought-leadership blog post:

8. Boost your top posts

If you have a budget for Facebook advertising, consider boosting your top-performing posts. Your top-performing posts are proven content — content that is proven to engage your audience. This makes them suitable for a boost. With the right ad targeting, these posts would continue to engage more people, reach even more people.

And you don’t need a lot of money for this.

With a $40 daily budget, our boosted posts get up to roughly four times more paid reach than organic reach. As reach increased, engagement on the posts also went up.

Here are some recent examples:

9. Recycle your top posts

Besides boosting your top posts, you can also recycle them.

This will help you get more value out of your content. When you re-post a piece of high-quality content, it can often generate as much reach and engagement as the original post (sometimes, more) — essentially doubling the value of that content.

For example, we first posted a blog post as a link with a list as the caption.

As our followers loved it, we (boosted it and) re-posted it with a video. This time, it reached almost twice as many people and generated a little more engagement, with roughly the same ad spend.

Instead of reposting the top-performing post as it is, change the post a little. There are several ways you can make it look fresh again:

• Add a video
• Add an image
• Ask a question

Generally, for Facebook, you would want to wait several weeks before reposting the same post if you are posting only once or two a day. This will prevent your followers from seeing the same post too often and getting bored of your Facebook posts.

10. Watch other Facebook Pages

The social media landscape is ever-changing. What’s working today might not work tomorrow. It can be helpful to learn from other Facebook Pages and see what has been working for them.

Facebook provides an excellent feature for this: Pages to Watch.

Pages to Watch allows you to compare the performance of your Facebook Page and posts with similar Pages at a glance. You can also easily check out each Page’s top posts by clicking on their Page name.

To access Pages to Watch, go to your Facebook Page Insights and scroll down to the bottom of the Overview tab.

11. Experiment with new content

Another way to keep up with the ever-changing social media landscape is to constantly experiment with new content.

Just a while back, images were the best type of content to drive engagement. Now, videos are taking the lead. Brands who started on video early before it became the norm were able to benefit from the trend the most.

Testing new types of content keeps you at the edge of the latest trends.

A technique we like to use was inspired by Coca-Cola’s 70/20/10 marketing budget rule.

You can use this rule in many ways. Here’s how I like to think of it when it comes to testing new Facebook content:

• 70 percent of your content should be the types of content that are already performing well now, such as videos and images.
• 20 percent of your content should be iterations and improvements of your 70 percent, such as new types of videos.
• 10 percent of your content should be experimental content, which might become the next big thing.

12. Reply comments

If you want your followers to engage with your Facebook posts, here’s something simple to try when they comment: reply to all their comments.

This would make them feel heard and be more willing to comment on your Facebook posts in the future.

There’s a psychological explanation for this, too. Moira Burke, who studied 1,200 Facebook users, found that personalized messages are more satisfying to the receiver than a simple Like.

Something we do at Buffer is to sign off each reply with our first name. This adds a personal touch to our replies. I like to think that many of our followers know that when they comment on our posts, they will be chatting with someone from Buffer and not simply commenting on a brand’s post.

We use Buffer Reply to reply our followers on Facebook (and also Twitter and Instagram). Having all the comments in one single place makes it more efficient as we don’t have to jump from post to post.

13. Host giveaways (occasionally)

Our contest and giveaway posts generally get the most amount of engagement.

Here’s an example from last year:

There are two things we keep in mind while hosting such giveaways:

• We do them only once in a while. Having giveaways regularly can sometimes annoy your followers (unless that’s the main objective of your Facebook Page). I would recommend leaving a few weeks or months between each one.
• We give relevant gifts. Most of the time, our prize is our Buffer swag. That’s because we know that many of our followers would love to get a Buffer swag (and we are thankful for that) and they are the exact audience we want to engage with.

14. Create a linked Facebook Group

Finally, a potential resolution to the falling organic reach and engagement on Facebook is to start a Facebook Group and link it to your Facebook Page.

A Facebook Group with your most engaged followers would likely generate more discussions than your Facebook Page. My hunch is that the discussions in your Facebook Group will benefit your Facebook Page in several ways:

• More awareness: As your members engage with one another in your Facebook Group, they likely have your brand at the top of their mind. You can also post and comment with your Facebook Page. All these might encourage your members to check out your Facebook Page, like live videos did for Social Media Examiner.
• Facebook algorithm boost: This is purely a guess. Since your Facebook Group is linked to your Facebook Page, engagement in your Facebook Group might influence how your Facebook Page posts rank on your members’ News Feed.

If you are considering starting a Facebook Group, here’s our complete guide to starting and managing a Facebook Group.

What have you been trying on Facebook?

If driving engagement on your Facebook Page has been challenging for you, I hope you’ve found one or two (or 14) tactics that might be useful to you.

One thing I would keep in mind when using these tactics is that it might take a while for the results to show. It took us some time to figure out what works for our Facebook Page. Don’t be disheartened if you don’t see an increase in engagement immediately.

Okay, that’s enough from me. I would love to hear about your Facebook Page strategy. What are some tactics you have tried and have been working (or not) for you? What are some of the tactics you would like to try going forward?

(If you liked this blog post, you might also like our blog post on the Facebook marketing tips that we had tested.)

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Image credit: Unsplash

source https://blog.bufferapp.com/increase-facebook-page-engagement