Public Relations and Social Media are two different things, yet they are very complementary. With social media, PR can be way more impactful and effective. Not only can professionals reach a lot of people through the different social media platforms, but it also allows them to have their content saved. In other words, content shared on social media will always stay, which will allow the public to go back to it whenever they want.
Having a Social Media strategy plays an important role in PR as it helps reaching stakeholders, journalists, influencers and the target audience as well as communicating with the public and getting their thoughts and feedback easily. To help you reach those objectives, here are the basic steps to create an effective social media strategy for your business.
1. Identify your SMART objectives
Knowing the objectives that you want to achieve is one of the most important steps when it comes to creating a social media strategy. It’s important to know what you want from using a social media strategy. It can be increasing the number of your followers, reaching new audiences, getting more traffic on your accounts and/or website, improving your income etc. as long as they are SMART.
Making your objectives SMART means that they need to be:
Specific: Define them and describe them as much as you can.
Measurable: Make sure that you will be able to evaluate them.
Achievable: Your objectives need to be reasonable and achievable.
Realistic: You can have challenging goals, you just have to be sure that you will be able to achieve them.
Timely: Fix a reasonable deadline and do your best to respect it.
2. Define your target audience
A very important step while making a social media strategy is to define the public you want to reach. No strategy can be effective if the target audience is not identified. You need to have enough information about your public: their characteristics, interests, demographics etc. You need to know how you can reach them easily, what they like, what they don’t like, how they consume products and their habits. The more you know about your audience, the easiest it will be for you to reach them and communicate with them.
3. Pick the right social media platforms
Choosing the social media platforms to use usually depends on the target audience. After defining and knowing more about the public you want to reach, you need to pick the right platforms to touch and interact with them. It can be Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, or even all of them. You just need to be sure that you will be able to manage and be active on all of them. As you may know, some audiences are reached more easily on certain platforms. Depending on who you want to reach, you will know what social media platforms to use.