Individual Assignment

SOCIAL MEDIA PLAN

MBA/20/5464: M. G. M. P. Gunatillake

Sub Group No.: B-1

Course : MBA 624 E Business & Social Media Strategies

Instructor : Dr. Gayan Jayakody

Term : September - December 2021

Postgraduate Institute of Management

University of Sri Jayewardenepura

 Declaration

I am fully aware of the content under plagiarism stated in the PIM Student Handbook,
and I hereby declare and affirm that I have strictly observed the law relating to
intellectual property, copyright and plagiarism in this exercise (Student Hand Book,
2018).

Name : M. G. M. P. Gunatillake

No : MBA/20/5464

Date : 30.12.2021

1
1. Introduction

Social media has become a vital tool to the business operate in the current context. The social
media platforms have been recognized as the most appropriate customer oriented tool for
approach the customers and the target audience. The most of the companies do not use the
full potential of the any kind of social media platforms. The most of the companies create a
profile and keep on random posting without any direction to achieve the audience. The most
of the businesses does not have a documented social media strategy. This emphasizes a
lacuna for most of the business which are expecting potential growth in the market. Initially
most of the companies do not have any focus on the social media plan and as well the work
flow often makes no expected outcome from the social media marketing efforts.

The social media plan is in simply explains as the social media strategy in the nut shell. This
is an insightful detail of everything you are planning to do and hope to achieve using the
social media profile. The well thought process for the social media strategy for your business
in terms of the social media presence is highly beneficial for the growth of the business. The
more specific and detailed plan will be better when the development of performance oriented
social media plan is concerned. If your social media platforms perform well your brand
awareness will be increased and you will acquire more customers and the proof of the social
acceptance can be visible. This will further enhance the strengthening the position in the
market place as a professional organization.

The 55% of the population are used the social media and the Face book is the most widely
used the social media platform. The average time spent on the social media 2.5 hours per day
by an average person and the age group of 18 to 25 is the most responsive group in the social
media.

The following areas are looking into when establish the social media plan.

1.1 Digital real estate

This is where the area of the ownership in the digital sphere in the market place.

1.2 Connections
This is where the number of followers or subscribers in the social media platform.

1.3 Content

This is the content that publishes in the digital platform to boost the reaction of the
followers.
2
 1.4 Engagement
This emphasize on how the interact with the current audience.

The Seylan Bank is a well establish Bank in Sri Lanka and it is important the approach
the social media platform to establish the brand and approach to the correct audience.
This will be important to establish the brand in the market and approach is important to
the reach to the correct market. The introduction of the digital banking the importance of
the social media for the financial institutions is important. Therefore, it is important to
establish a proper social media plan to achieve the objectives set by the management.

2. Audit the current situation

“Know thyself. Know the customer. Innovate.” – Beth Comstock

It is important to identify the current situation before you establish the social media plan.
The first thing should be ascertained the level of presence in the social media platforms.
The network most probably you are currently active and the current network is optimizing
with the photos, contents. The competitor profile and the current profile should be
evaluated. The tools such as SWOT and PESTEL analysis could be able to conduct to
identify the current position of the brand. The SWOT can be used to identify the strengths
and the weaknesses of the origination and the opportunities and the treats in the business
environment. The PESTEL analysis is to explore the political, environmental, social,
technologically, economically and legal perspective of the organisation. This will help to
identify the businesses and the competitors among other peer companies. This will
facilitate to identify the what, how, where the social media communication has taken place
and what extent that the social media platform is utilized. Therefore, the Seylan Bank
should indentify the level of reaction and the followers of the social media channels. The
developments of the other peer banks based on the digital and social media should be
considered to identify the existing position of the social media platforms. This will
facilitate to identify the potential growth opportunities in the banking business.

3
3. Identify the target group
It is crucial to identify the target audience when considering successful social media plan.
This will facilitate to identify the ideal target group to the relevant social media campaign.
There are few ways to implement and identify the correct audience. The research has been
carried out to identify the level of different other audiences.

“The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service
fits him and sells itself.” – Peter Drucker

The introduction of the ideal personas to the audience will lead to convert the audience to the
level required by detailed description of the specific persons with the real wants and needs.
This will facilitate the turn the fans as the followers and add the right segment to the
audience. The knowledge of the existing audience will help to identify the adjustment
required to existing audience to reach the expected audience. The best marketers will be
failed if they are marketing to the wrong audience. The factors should be considered to
identify the correct market is age, location, job, income, most used social media platforms
could be considered when developing strong social media campaign.

Ideal customer identification and creating the ideal customer will determine success of the
campaign. The relevant tools should be used to identify the correct audience and growth the
right audience to obtain the good results.

4. Create a social media mission statement

“What makes you weird, makes you unique and therefore makes you stand out.” – Dan
Schawbel
The mission statement creates the future actions to be carried out and this will clear exactly
what you plan to use your social media presence to reflect the expected brand identity. The
statement should be oriented based on the customer audience you are expected to focus
through social media. The example for the mission statement could be considered as “to use
social media to educate the digital marketing to the presence and expected customers”. This
simple statement will give guideline to establish what share or create in the banking digital
business to be improved.

The social media objectives has to be defined either to increase the brand awareness and or
increasing community engagement. This may be to increase the large number of followers or

4
active community. It is important to define the social media objective and that will support to
develop social media strategy to achieve the objective. This will give an assessment to how
much energy and the time to be invested on the achievement of objectives.

The following sample objectives could be able to incorporate to the social media plan

Increased brand awareness could be help to getting the name popular in the market place.
This will facilitate to create the growing audience. This will support to generate the leads and
sales and that could be considered as another objective. The growing the brand audience is
introducing the brand who have not heard the brand before. This will create the awareness by
creating the conversation among the folk. This will boost the community engagement. This
will be another objective that facilitates the involvement of the cheerleader. The drive the
traffic to the site could be creating more engagement or active in the social media platforms
by creating promotional post or social ads. The combination of the above objective or one
objective could be used to develop the social media plan. There may be distracted when too
many objectives are adopted but select one or two objectives and rally the team around the
brand to achieve the same.

5. Identify the Key success factors.

“If you cannot measure it you cannot improve it.” – Lord Kelvin
It is important to identify the efforts taken on social media campaign is successful or not. It is
important to identify the money that can be gained through the social media campaign rather
than improving the number of followers. Therefore success of the marketing plan will be
determined by improving the bottom line rather spending money and time is effortless. The
critical success factors (CSF) such as conversion rate, time spent on the site, reach, and brand
mentions, sentiment, total shares could be considered. It is important to identify the different
platforms are attracted different audiences. This will define the which network your brand is
suppose to approach and which type of content to publish will be determined. The Face book
and You Tube has high earning user bases. The millennial and gen X are most of the time are
using the Instagram and you tube.LinkedIn user base is well educated and in-depth industry
specific content which is niche and could not found in the Facebook or Twitter that extent. It
is important to identify the social media dash board to identify the performance.

5
Key performance indicators (KPIs) are important to identify the performance and the success
of the social media campaign.

Reach is the number of the unique users who saw the post. How much of your content
actually reaches the user feeds. The clicks can be considered as the number of clicks on the
content or account. This is important to identify what is most curiosity or encourages the
people busy. The engagement is considered as the total number of interactions divided by the
number of impressions. This sheds light that how audience perceived and their willingness
to react. Hash tag performance can be considered as the most associated hash tag associated
with the brand and that can be used to shape and focus of the content. The organic and paid
likes determine the budget you have to spend and the time you invest in different formats.
The sentiment is how people react on the brand, content or hash tag. This will emphasize on
the importance of the dig deeper and how people talk about that the Seylan Bank brand.

6. Create the engaging social content

“Content is where I expect much of the real money will be made on the Internet.” – Bill
Gates

This is most important in the social media platform to be success and it is important to have
an idea what to publish based on the goals, audience and brand identity. The achieve the said
objective there should be proper strategy based on the images, posts, blog posts, company
news, infograpgics, eBooks and interviews etc. The stories and the time sensitive posts are
important to taking the followers the behind the scene and the social media feed more
personnel. This will consider the how you can use stories to cover the event or how to take
followers on a journey without them leaving the comfort of the story. It is known by the
marketers video is the most valuable content type for achieving the social goals. The social
video is growing with the TikTok and Instagram reels. The long term as well as short term
productions to be continues to dominate in the social media space across all platforms. The
developing videos does not required huge budgets, that can be done in a lap top with using
small number of tools.

It is important to identify the presence of the competitors in the social media. This will
facilitate to identify the key words, phrases and the industry word to identify and based on
that can create the content. The goals and mission statement is important when developing

6
the content and correct bench marking will support to identify the gaps with the strong
competitors in terms of the social media. Therefore, engaging high quality content as top
priority. It is important to create a content calendar that outlines how often you will post to
each network, topic shared and time shared content and the schedule time for future content.

It is import to promote the right content mix. The content strategy and the content calendar
reflect the mission statement assigned to each social media platforms and the profiles.
Therefore, anything posted could be having an influence on the achievement of the
objectives. The 80/20 rule is used to development of the content at the initial stage. This
emphasize the 80% of the posts should inform, educate or entertain the audience and balance
20 % is to promote the brand. At the same time it is possible to follow the social media
content marketing rule of one thirds. The one third of the content to promote the business
converts the readers and generates profit. The next one third of content shares ideas and
stories from thought leaders in the existing business and the last one third of the content is to
personnel interaction with the audience. It is important to decide how often promote each
platform, where to identify the maximum engagement. It is posting too frequently might get
annoyed the audience at the sometime posting too little is considered that not worth of
following. Therefore the Seylan bank should have clear strategy in the content creating and
the content calendar to optimize the social media platforms to achieve the objectives and
social media mission statement. The Bank should develop a proper social media team to
content creation, promotions; react to the followers and the monitoring the behavior in the
platforms. There are deep analytical tools to identify the performance of the social media
platforms and the BI tools could be introduced to achieve the said objective.

7. Make the social presence as timely as possible

The timeliness is more important than ever for marketers. It is important to create fresh
content regular basis to facilitate the followers in live with the social media platform. It is not
be able to expect the customers to operate on your clock and the timeliness is more important.
Therefore, it is important to post the new content when the followers are at the peak time
frames to expect more and more react on the content.

It is important to respond the customer questions and shout outs as soon as possible. The
criticalness is where the content posting time and the most of the followers are able to react

7
on that. There should be the team available to communicate the any quarries are raised by the
followers. The availability of the community managers and the team to provide the correct
reactions should be ensured on time. It is important not only posting at the most peak times
but the resources should be available on the react to the followers. Therefore, the team should
be designed to specific response task can help the staff can run like a well oiled social media
team.

8. Track the performance, analyses and optimize the performance by adjusting the
strategy

“If you torture the data long enough, it will confess to anything.” – Ronald Coase

This is most important step when it comes to succeeding on the social media. It is not
advisable to rely on the trial and error method. It is important to tracking the result,
analyzing the data and making tweaks to optimize them is crucial. The continuous re-
evaluation is important to analyses the marketing efforts .The great social media strategy is
not set in stone but it is continuously change when it is necessary. It is optimizing by
continue grow and learn more about the business and specially the audience that follows
you. Without continuously analyzing your efforts it may not be able to identify the how one
campaign did over another. This would be carried out based on the top performance content
of you or the competitors. It is important to share the data with the other core workers who
are in other departments and the colleagues. The insights of them are more valuable to next
social media strategy overhaul. It is important to develop the social media return on
investment (ROI) to assess the impact towards the bottom line of the organization based on
the social media initiatives taken by the Bank.

The collaboration of the other departments is highly critical to success the social media
strategy. The support from other department in terms of the sales, human resources could
be more beneficial to develop a successful social media strategy. It is important to develop
a performance matrix to ascertain the number of visits of the customer and the movement of
him or her in the website is critical. The way create data traffic should be evaluated to
identify the more important contents and the special factors of particular contents. It is
important to create a single dash board to indicate easily plan, create and schedule posts
every day, track relevant key words, to stay on engagement and get easy to understand
8
 performance reports and improve the strategy as required by the indicators built to the dash
boards.

The successful social media strategy depends on the branding, content, curation. The
number of time spreading the content which is called the frequency of the network,
engagement and the social listening where the understanding the real heart beat of the
followers of the any social media platform.

9. Conclusion

It is important to identify the correct social media platform to promote the Seylan Bank
brand. There are more platforms could be seen in the market. The Facebok is one of the
popular platforms to use to improve the brand awareness and the brand promotion and the
one third principal could be used to establish the Seylan brand in the social media
platforms. The Sri Lankan context Facebook has more popular against the instagram. The
bank has strong customer base in the wide spectrum and the Facebook platform is the most
appropriate platform to address. The most of the banks use the Facebook as a social media
promotional platform and the reaction on the certain content could be evaluated as the
bench mark to ascertain the most influential contents. This will further shape the existing
social media platform. The bank uses the different social media platforms such as intagram,
Linkedin etc. They should be able to identify the optimize social media solution to obtain
the high ROI on the investments on the social media.

9
 References

https://sproutsocial.com/insights/social-media-marketing-strategy/ on 30.12.2021

https://blog.hootsuite.com/how-to-create-a-social-media-marketing-plan on 30.12.2021

https://ducttapemarketing.com/social-media-marketing-plan/ on 30.12.2021

Michael R. S., & Tracy T. (2015). Social Media Marketing (2nd ed.). India: SAGE
Publications.
Turban E., Volonino L., Wood G. R. (2015). Information Technology for Management,
(10th ed.). India: Wiley

10