Social Media Strategy

 Social Media became popular in the late 2000s because it promoted a tantalizing
opportunity for B2C’s because it gave them a platform to directly interact with the customers
free of charge. If you could properly harness this newfound consumer-company connection,
then you would be able to earn massive returns on small social media investments. There
were a lot of runaway marketing successes at that time, for example, Old Spice.
 Initially everyone thought that social media would be very beneficial because of the
consumer-company connection. But right now, the hype around social media is just that.
 A lot of companies were able to amass a large social media following, but they also realized
that this following didn’t translate into high revenue. Some others realized that if you pursue
it rigorously with a framework some advantages are unmatched to other marketing
channels.
 Every time people talk about doing social media, they are referring to:
o Creating content or posts for a company’s social media page.
o You are doing an activity that would be in line with you running paid ads.
o Using it for reputation management.
 The most distinct of these is creating content or posts such that you can directly interact with
the customer.
 All three of these activities are important because they accomplish the company’s objectives
by different means. In most cases, the objective is to create and retain a customer. And social
media does just that.
 When brands post content on social media pages they do it with the intention to:
o Create a first (new) customer. While effective, there are a lot of factors that prevent
regular posts from becoming an enormous source of first-time customer revenue for
you.
 Issues:
 The algorithm of social media pages is such that they handicap posts
from business entities. So even if you have a lot of followers, your
organic posts would only be seen by a few.
 Incentives for social media users are not compatible with the
facilitation process of customer creation. BlendTec’s example. These
algorithms do so so that businesses spend on ads.
o Facilitating additional purchases from a previous or current customer i.e. increasing
customer loyalty.
 Posting content is more successful when you have loyal customers.
 Are much more effective when they are serving to build loyalty for you.
 If companies can acquire followers through their social media platforms,
then want to engage them with content that primarily re-enforces their
relationship and offerings to its customers which would generate loyalty and
hence repeat purchases from the customers.
Acquisition  Engagement  Loyalty
 If you're engaging with customers on a range of platforms/channels it
increases the profit the company generates.
 Companies that engage in this social media activity encourage interaction
from the followers firstly because a lot of social media platforms handicap
posts from companies, and these posts aren’t shown unless the algorithm
 determines that the followers want to see that post from the company.
Algorithms determine the likability of the posts by the level of interaction
that is generated by these posts.
 If you want to benefit from this, you should generally post videos. Because
video views are counted as an interaction, you can get these very easily
generated.
o Supplement your SEO efforts.
 Social media activities impact your search ranking. This is done only when
you’ve done everything to optimize SEO, last is using social media to
supplement these efforts.
 If your company is dependent on local search results, then you use social
media posting for SEO purposes. Social media signals have a large influence
on your local search rankings.
 if companies are using social media to optimize their SEO then they do this
because they want to improve their search engine rankings, and they do this
because they strive for a high level of earned media.
 Paid/Owned/Earned Media:
 Paid Media: Typically, your advertisements.
 Owned Media: Company-controlled properties i.e. website, social
media account. Email accounts
 Earned Media: The mentions of the company by entities outside of
the company. One of the social media signals that matters to search
engines is the attention the company generates from social media
posts and users. Content that gets reshared or starts a conversation
amongst users, and earned media can affect your search engine
ranking. Someone is attesting and endorsing you.
o Paid Advertising.
 Influencer marketing would come under this.
 Goes hand in hand with posting content.
 Companies that have successfully leveraged social media’s paid advertising
platform for a good profit far outnumber the companies that have been
profitable on social media solely through posting on their social media
profiles.
 FB’s and Instagram’s ad platforms are like that of Google’s Display Ad
platform. Advertisers decide on a target, make the budget and ad copy, run
the ad, and based on the results determine how the ad performed.
Advertising on social media has distinct advantages from that of Google’s:
 They have lots of user info and do very perfect and precise ad
targeting. Show people the content that is relevant to them.
 Social media ads show up in the feed and that’s why their
engagement rates are very high. Display ads on Google don’t
perform the same way due to ad blockers.
 These platforms offer more engagement options than Google. You
can use immersive ads on FB. Display ad is either you click it or
ignore it and is shown in only one form.
 Paid advertising is more effective at generating new customers than
is posting on own social media profiles because brands that
 advertise on social media platforms cannot completely open their
content to all their followers, because that’s how the algorithm
works. That doesn’t mean that if you’re running paid ads, you stop
posting regular content. If the companies don’t post regular content
consumers will think it’s not a legitimate business. You can reduce
the frequency of the posts, you don’t stop.
o Reputation Management
 Brands are mentioned in multiple conversations across the social space. And
companies have tools that allow them to monitor these conversations and
respond to them as and when needed. When you’re engaging with your
customers on social media as a brand you show publicly that you are
fulfilling all the rights of the customers when it comes to being heard.
 Social Media Monitoring: Responding to all comments, good or bad. Positive
comments are amplified, and a positive sentiment is generated. When you
respond to a negative comment you are acknowledging customer’s feedback
and are demonstrating your willingness to learn which also amplifies a
positive image for you. You are striving to fix problems for your customers by
responding to customers. You are also trying to avoid any social media crisis
that could arise from negative comments.
 This approach requires a lot of company resources. You need a big
team.
 Whatever communication that happens from the company’s social
media profile, is happening between the customer and directly with
the company. Not the company employee. So, any error from an
employee would affect the company’s brand.
 Social Media Listening: Analyze customer’s data produced by these
conversations to gain insights into customers thoughts and sentiments.
Researchers are there who use social media data to measure what is the
strength of the brand’s association and measure customer’s sentiments for
the brands.
Lots of tools and techniques exist.
 You scrape all public mentions of the brand.
 Then you code them as positive, negative, or neutral.
 Then you summarize it and provide the average sentiment.
Pitfalls of Social Media Listening:
 It can be very difficult to find company relevant mentions on social
media.
 How to code the sentiment? Unrealistic to do so manually. You need
a tool for it but can be unreliable, since it’s difficult to analyze what
context is.
 It’s questionable whether the sentiment score is useful for you or
not. They are often not an accurate representation of the general
population of customers towards the company.
 Once you’ve decided to use social media, you need to come up with a social media plan that
would include the following steps:
o Determine the objective: the easiest portion of your plan. The purpose of joining
social media platforms. This is in line with what activity (as discussed above) that you
 will be doing on social media. If your objective isn’t as obvious, then you should
focus on efforts that are easily accomplished and that are easily measured, which at
this point is social media advertising (most straightforward and easy to measure).
Begin with advertising as an objective if you are unsure.
7 common objectives:
 Find new customers through social media posts.
 Find new customers through social media ads.
 Find new customers through search engines (by way
 of social media).
 Increase customer loyalty through social media posts.
 Increase customer loyalty through social media ads.
 Increase customer loyalty through social monitoring.
 Gain customer insights through social listening.
o Choose the platform: What platform will you be using? A lot of viable options are
available. However, most companies dont have the resources or bandwidth to utilize
each platform effectively. That is why you need to determine, based on your
objective, which social media platforms are best suited to your objective. Your
decision depends on two things:
 Platform’s population characteristics:
 Total Population i.e. Size of active users, to date because people
choose FB.
 Population density of your likely customers.
 Nature of company-person interaction.
 The distinct structure of each social media interaction is the primary
reason why these platforms exist. The user experience on FB is very
different from that of Pinterest. If it weren’t different these
platforms wouldn’t have existed.
 These differences allow the accomplishment of distinct objectives of
digital marketers.
 If the objective is to get first-time customers, this will require some
paid-for distribution of your content, YouTube is a primary platform
because video is info-rich and can be persuasive in generating
conversion. Video = potential of virality. But they will supplement
even the viral content with paid ads. Instagram is secondary and
thrives on influencer marketing, these too require incentives in paid
or product form. Boosting doesn’t help, focus more on paid ads.
 Posting for customer loyalty, then you’d focus on Instagram and
Snapchat because the customer is already convinced, and this
content allows you to provide more info to spur additional
purchases. B2B is mostly on LinkedIn.
 SEO is mostly focused on FB and X. FB gives valuable info to search
engines regarding which companies are generating excitement and
interest for customers. X is a close second valuable source because it
tells the search engine what people are talking about publicly.
 Advertising objective would be focused on FB and Instagram. Large
customer base on FB. Fine-tune targeting on FB. Even those working
 niche can target well. Instagram ads are more effective than FB ads.
YouTube ads can also be utilized, with a high engagement rate.
 Reputation management objective would be through forum
websites or recently X (B2C) and LinkedIn (B2B).
o Platform Synergies: the more platforms a company chooses to participate in the
more resources would the company be allocating to them. So, you won't be able to
avail all the platforms. However, some synergies exist amongst platforms wherein a
company can create content for one platform and use the same content on the other
platform. You just need to make small adjustments and your costs and work are
reduced with this. No synergy would be perfect, you need to make adjustments. FB
& Instagram Synergy. Instagram content is images and videos. Images and videos
both perform well on FB. Fb and X synergy. X content is mostly text with some
images and text. FB text doesn’t do as well, video and images are better performing.
So, content of either can be posted on both. FB and YouTube synergy. Videos are
very expensive to make, but you need them because they have ROI, so if you make it
once you can post them on both accounts. Native reel made on Instagram wont
perform well on TikTok and vice versa.
o Plan the content: Making content for ads is easy, you make an ad copy, make the
creative content, roll it out. What we focus on is the guidelines of content creation:
Types of Content:
 Original Content: Content that is original to the company. All creative control
and messaging control is with you.
 Repurposed content: content that you made for some other purpose
but because it was applicable in a different scenario you repurpose
it. Ad campaign content that you use as original content. Beneficial
because it makes use of limited resources. And makes your
messaging consistent.
 User-Generated Content (UGC): Any content that is created by platform
users. Often companies invite users to create content based on a theme.
Note: This is not influencer marketing, which is a paid marketing activity.
 It may be reposted by the company.
 Or users may be asked to post it using certain hashtags.
Benefits:
 The company expands the amount of potential content it can post.
 Allows the company to personalize its connection with the customer.
Customers posting content can humanize the brand.
Issue:
 Customers often don’t have an incentive to respond to the
company’s request to post content because creating this content
requires effort from their end, thus unless they offer an intrinsic or
extrinsic motivation is necessary.
 Legal requirements need to be kept in mind when creating content
and need to be regulated.
 Co-created Content: Creating content with other brands, which benefits both
parties. Both brands get exposure to the counterpart’s followers. Happens
on all platforms but most widely done on YouTube. You are able to make
unique content that is very relevant to people.
  Curated Content: Post content created entirely by another entity. Example,
retweet, reposts etc. Should be a small portion of posted content.
 Once you’ve figured out your content type you will decide what mix of social
media assets you will incorporate, that will support each post:
 Videos
 Images
 GIFs
 Blog Posts
 Infographics
 eBooks
 Case studies
 Third-party industry articles or report
 Once you’ve decided on the social media assets you come with your social
media style guide. You’re using a platform where you are directly
communicating with the customer, so all this communication is bound to
impact your brand’s perception and image, so thus, every brand has a social
media style guide, which is consistent with the way the company wishes its
brand image to be perceived. Allows for consistency when the brand’s social
media profile is managed by several people. You decide the following:
 Tone: messages can be worded and understood in many ways. A
company’s word choice is the single most important factor in
determining how the brand is being perceived. It should be
extensively thought to the tone they use in their posts and
responses to customer’s comments. You can be quirky, snarky,
authentic, or passionate.
 Legal: Because you operate in a specific industry there are some
legal restrictions you’d need to abide by. All people in the social
media team need to be well-versed in the legal guidelines.
 Response Guidelines: How you respond to your customers is very
important. Some default responses/scenarios are part of the
guidelines.
 Formatting Guidelines: Caption length, image sizes, emojis that can
or can’t be used. Grammer, hashtags etc. This is done to ensure
there’s no miscommunication via your messaging. There’s
consistency in your content and messaging. Shouldn’t be haphazard.
 Any other useful guidelines: Branding guidelines. What kind of UGC
content can be posted?
 Creating Value & Engagement: Your content should be such that it
creates value and encourages engagement. It could either give
utilitarian value to your customers or entertainment value i.e.
humor etc. or community building value.
 Schedule Content: You need a social media calendar. Assign days for
posts. Optimal posting days to be decided, time, and quantity of
posts. Pre-scheduled abilities of platforms or software.
o Distribute and promote content: No matter the high quality of your content, it won’t
benefit you if no one is consuming it. So distribution of your content is very
important. To achieve distribution of its posted content the brand must attract
 engaged followers to its owned media, and social media profiles. You must have
engaged followers if you are to overcome the challenges that arise due to the
algorithms not showing your organic content. If you have engaged users, then the
algorithm can't handicap it and will show it on the feed. Another method is through
your earned media via any exposure to the company’s content generated by the
activities of people external to the company. This is a form of free publicity for the
brand. You can also pay for your distribution. Paid distribution.
 6 factors that help generate earned media for you:
 Social Currency: We tend to share things that make us look good to
others. You should create posts that could be social currency.
 Triggers: Talk about things that are associated with things in our
environment.
 Emotion: Feelings deepen your connection. Emotional content will
garner a lot of attention.
 Public: People are likely to talk about observable things.
 Practical Value: Content that is useful and solves a problem will be
talked about.
 Stories: Humans like stories. So, create stories that will make the
company a protagonist. Story-focused content.
o Measure Success: Social media platforms got popular as a channel, firstly because
you were in direct communication with the customer and second, whatever you
were doing was being effectively measured. Using posting metrics to measure your
success. Not all metrics are important. Those that align with your KPIs are the ones
to be focused on:
 Volume:
 Total Followers: A vanity metric. The algorithm determines based on
engagement so there’s no point in having lots of unengaged
followers. Can see follower growth: tell you about the list growth.
 Impressions/Views: Can be seen at a total level as well as per post.
Tells you how the post is performing.
 Engagement:
 Re-port/re-tweet
 Total likes/comment
 Engagement Rate: Likes / Followers. Most important metric because
it tells the % of followers that have engaged with a piece of content.
Provides a good indication of the overall engagement of your
company’s customer base. A large number of followers would not be
beneficial as mentioned before.
 Conversion: measures customer loyalty.
 Click-through Rate
 Conversion Rate
 Purchase Frequency/Likelihood: % of followers who purchased. If my
campaign goal is to retain customers or create customers, I would
want to see if the followers are purchasing more frequently or are
the non-followers purchasing more frequently. Important Caveats of
metric:
 o High Purchase Frequency may not be caused by social media
content, and it only reflects that loyal customers are likely to
engage with the company’s social media content.
o Obtaining and calculating this data is difficult. You can work
it out though.
 Social Media Advertising Metrics:
o Impressions: How many saw the ad.
o CTR: How many clicked from how many saw the ad?
o Conversion Rate: How many converted after clicking on the ad.
 Social Listening Metrics: software required for this. You train it first.
o Total Volume: Number of Posts or tweets mentioning company
o Sentiment: % of posts or tweets that are positive or negative
o Change in Total Volume
o Change in Sentiment
o Topics that are being discussed.