Information in this blog post was obtained from HubSpot, HootSuite, and SproutSocial.
So, you have decided to implement a social media marketing strategy for your small business? That’s great! But now you’re left wondering what to do next. Well, we’ve got you covered. For starters, it’s important to keep creating quality content that will satisfy your target audience. Aside from that, you will need to figure out how to best maintain your social media marketing strategy for the long haul.
In this blog post, we will look over three easy steps that will allow you to further take advantage of social media marketing while you continue to grow your business. The three steps we will look at are how to track performance, make adjustments, and repurpose content. By using these three steps, you will find that maintaining a social media marketing strategy might not be as difficult a task as you previously had thought.
1. Track Performance
The first step to maintaining a social media marketing strategy is to track the performance of your content to gain a better understanding of the level of success it had. According to HubSpot, there are ten metrics that are most helpful when looking at content performance. These metrics include engagement, reach, followers, impressions, video views, profile visits, mentions, tags, reposts, and shares. As you can imagine, knowing these types of metrics will give a much better view of the level of interaction the audience is giving. If a post is showing to have strong levels of engagement, one can assume it’s a successful post. Vise versa, if a post is not being viewed as much and has a low amount of likes, shares, and reposts, you can reasonably assume it was not received as well as other posts.
2. Make Adjustments
As mentioned in the previous section, reviewing key metrics helps give an overview of the success of each post. According to HootSuite, using the information gained by the key metrics, you will be able to identify certain trends over time. For example, if you notice that post about spring gardening is receiving much higher levels of engagement from your audience than posts about composting, it might be a sign to create more content centered around spring gardening and less content about composting. This is a simple example but the overall important thing to look for is how to maximize your audience's engagement levels. This is most easily done by providing them with relevant content that best fits their needs.
Side note: Don’t be afraid to change the direction or focus of your content to better align with your follower's needs. On the flip side, don’t be discouraged from posting about the things you and your business are passionate about if it isn’t performing as well. Simply find ways to make the lesser performing content more relevant and enticing to your audience.
3. Repurpose Content
Once you understand the importance of tracking the performance of your content and making slight adjustments/changes to your content, you are well on your way to successfully maintaining a high-functioning social media marketing strategy. The third and final step we will talk about is repurposing content. You will find that over time it becomes more and more difficult to continue putting out unique content. It’s only natural that the more topics you cover, the more challenging it is to find a new topic to create content over. To help counteract this, you can repurpose older, well-performing, content. This is a great way to help alleviate some of the stress that comes from the content creation process.
Repurposing content can be done in a large variety of ways. SproutSocial provided many examples such as turning a high-performing blog post into an Instagram post or turning a webinar into a video. It is important to focus on the platforms you wish to post your repurposed content on in order to maximize its formatting to best fit that platform. Also, make sure the content type fits the needs of the audience of the social media platform you are utilizing. Lastly, ensure you are not posting the same content to the same platforms just in a slightly different format. Doing so can annoy your audience or make them view your business as lazy for providing repetitive content.
In this blog post, we talked through three easy steps to maintain a social media marketing strategy for your small business. The first step was to track the performance of your content by looking at key metrics. The second step was to use the information gained by tracking the performance of your content to make adjustments/changes to the content you are providing. The third and final step was to use your older, high-performing, content by repurposing it into new forms of content to post on other social media platforms. By following these three steps, your small business will be able to maintain a successful social media marketing strategy for years to come.
Resources
Baker, Kristen. “Social Media Marketing: The Ultimate Guide.” HubSpot Blog, 15 Apr. 2022, https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/social-media-marketing.
Burton, Shannon. “The Greatest Hits: Repurposing Your Best Content for Social Media.” Sprout Social, 7 Sept. 2021, https://sproutsocial.com/insights/repurposing-content-for-social-media/.
Newberry, Christina, and Evan LePage . “How to Create a Social Media Marketing Strategy (Free Template).” Social Media Marketing & Management Dashboard, 23 Mar. 2022, https://blog.hootsuite.com/how-to-create-a-social-media-marketing-plan/#Step_9_Track_performance_and_adjust_your_social_media_strategy_accordingly.
Comments