When starting out with social media marketing (SMM), a lot of people tend to jump right into the operational phase, which is creating and publishing social media posts. But, what about the strategy?

In fact, like all other marketing channels, social media marketing must also meet a number of requirements, with the development of a strategy as a priority. In addition to being a very important lever in the implementation of the various campaigns, your "social media strategy" will allow you to define the different axes on which your communication on social media will depend. The choice of networks, the choice of targets, the frequency of your publications, the expected objectives, etc ...

In this post, we will try to quickly see the different steps necessary for the development of a winning social media strategy and how to implement it in practice.

First, let's start by defining the SMM. According to Buffer, “Social media marketing is the use of social media platforms to connect with your audience in order to grow your brand, increase sales, and drive website traffic. It involves posting quality content to your social media profiles, listening to and engaging your followers, analyzing your results, and serving ads on social media. ” The principle is therefore to use all these platforms and applications that allow people and brands to connect with each other. Normal, we're talking about “social media” marketing after all 😁😁.

So, to implement a good strategy, you must first ask yourself several questions:

• Why do you want to be on social media?
• Who is your target audience?
• What are you going to share?
• Where are you going to share?
• When are you going to share?

The answer to these questions can be summed up in three points which will be the essential components of your strategy:

- Define your goals

The best way to find out why you are getting into social media marketing is to be clear about your goals. It will then be a question of demonstrating the purpose of your strategy and how SMM can help you achieve it. For this, there can be several types of objectives. For some, social media is a simple way to increase their audience and brand awareness, while others use it as a support for their customer service. The important thing to remember is that your goal should be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Acceptable, Realistic).

- Choose your social media

Even though there are several social media platforms, you certainly won't be present on all of them. Depending on the type of your audience, it is best to select a few channels that you are going to focus on. In fact, it's better to be present and active on one social media only than to be present everywhere without being able to engage your community. When choosing a social network, be sure that your audience is there and that you have all the resources you need to follow up and facilitate.

- Develop your editorial charter

After having defined your objective and your target, you will obviously have to animate your various pages with engaging content. By setting up an editorial charter to follow, you create a framework for the development and management of your content. The themes to address, the media formats to publish, the expressions to never use ... in short, everything that allows you to limit the content of your pages to the expectations of your followers while keeping a certain consistency with the values ​​of your business.

In addition, your social media strategy is scalable. Depending on your current objectives, or the budget you allocate to your communication, the editorial charter, the frequency of publication, the choice of targets, etc… may change.
For some, in addition to a defined overall strategy, there may also be a "sub-strategy" for each social network. Thus, we will have a variant for Instagram, another for Facebook and so on. Each of them will have to take into account these different questions :

• Why do you want to be on this social network?
• Who is your target audience?
• What are you going to share?
• When are you going to share?

In summary, to set up a good social media marketing strategy, you must necessarily define your objectives, choose the different channels and finally implement an editorial charter. The latter makes it possible to channel the perimeter of your various content.

You don't have a well-defined strategy yet, it's not too late yet. You can start from your knowledge (data and experiences) to implement it now.