Last week I attended an event at Montréal Cowork called: ‘Comment créer une stratégie réseaux sociaux gagnante en 2019’ (How to design a winning social media strategy in 2019). The event was organized by La Fusée and based on a French-language blog post published by digital marketing agency Digitad.
While I had heard many of the tips before, there were several that had been updated to deal with the realities of social media marketing in 2018 (and 2019) and I found them to be insightful.
Did you know that we now spend an average of 116 minutes on social media every day?!?
I wanted to share some of my learnings with friends who don’t speak French and would not benefit from the original blog post. Below, I prepared a summary of the event and its main points.
SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY FRAMEWORK
The basic structure of a social media strategy is easy, but it requires some homework to fill in each section. The six main steps are:
- Identify your objectives
- Identify your target audiences
- Pick the right social media platform
- Understand the algorithms
- Devise a content strategy and adapt it for each platform
- Review and improve your performance
The objectives and target audiences will differ for each organization. The workshop did not go in-depth into either of these steps, but it did give a few tips to keep in mind:
IDENTIFY YOUR OBJECTIVES
In thinking about objectives, keep in mind that potential clients or audiences use social media for different purposes and may be at different levels along the spectrum of engagement: exploring (passive research), evaluating options (active research), taking action (engaging in/buying a company’s product or service), retaining loyalty (identifying with a brand).
IDENTIFY YOUR TARGET AUDIENCES
For the target audience, it helps to think in terms of personas of real people and their real demographics, things like: age, sex, profession, location, family make-up, interests, goals, personality, lifestyle, etc.
PICK THE RIGHT SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORM
This is where I thought the workshop delivered some really powerful insights. They had great statistics on how each platform is used, making it easy to understand which one is best for each target audience.
- 2 billion users
- 56% male / 44% female
- 65% are older than age 35
- Users are both urban and rural
- Good for both Business to Business (B2B) and Business to Consumer (B2C) marketing
YOUTUBE
- 1.5 billion users
- 62% male / 38% female
- 61% are aged between 16 and 34
- Good for both B2B and B2C
- 800 million users
- 38% of women use it, only 26% of men
- Popular with those aged 15 to 30
- Mostly urban audience
- Better for B2C
- 350 million users
- 50% male / 50% female
- Used mainly by public figures, journalists, influencers
- Good for both B2B and B2C
SNAPCHAT
- 180 million users
- 70% female / 30% male
- 70% of users are under aged 34
- Better for B2C
- 106 million users
- 31% of men and 27% of women use LinkedIn
- Users tend to have a high income
- Better for B2B
- 100 million users
- 70% female / 30% male
- Good for both B2B and B2C
- Adapté au B2C et au B2B
UNDERSTAND THE ALGORITHMS
Each platform uses its own mathematical algorithm to decide how far to share the content posted on the site. Using the algorithms effectively can make the difference between getting a few hundred views and a few thousand views. It’s a big deal!
Of course the quality of the content is important, but here are other things that Facebook considers when it decides how many people to show the post it, according to the Workshop:
- Popularity: In the past, how often users engage with your page’s content. How often you share content is also factored in.
- Performance: Numbers of likes, reactions, comments, and shares. According to the workshop, having a long comments by users soon after you post content will make it more likely to be shared broadly, consider captions and content that solicit longer replies from the audience. Shares are also ranked highly, especially if the shared posts also generate engagement
- Type of Content: Text, images, video, live video, links. Images or videos are very important. Facebook does not like posts with links to external pages because it causes the audience to leave their platform. They will likely not share the post as widely. Facebook also tries to limit ‘clickbait’ posts
- Timeliness: Recent content will be shared more, so even having posts going out at 7 a.m. versus 8:59 a.m. makes a difference, if your target audience is reading the material as they get into the office.
- Originality: Facebook doesn’t want you to just repost content that is published elsewhere.
DEVISE A CONTENT STRATEGY AND ADAPT IT FOR EACH PLATFORM
Golden Rules for Social Media Posts in 2019:
- Choose topics (and tones) that interest your specific audience
- Generate conversations
- Use high quality images and graphics
- Adapt your content for each platform
- Use content formats that encourage engagement
- Use short-lived content that vanishes after a certain period (i.e. Instagram stories, Snapchat)
- Take advantage of user-generated content
- Plan your publications
- Publish at the right time (during high-traffic periods)
- Consider payed content
- Consider reaching out to influencers
- Encourage the audience to make contact
REVIEW AND IMPROVE YOUR PERFORMANCE
Most social media platforms allow you to monitor your engagement and reach. Track your performance and keep track of popular engagement times, then align your posts to those popular times. Remember that it’s not just your number of followers that is important: a smaller, active community is more valuable than a larger, passive one.
interesting!