Social Media Platform Strategy

I have to admit that I have a love/hate relationship with social media sometimes. I love it when brands and people can have meaningful conversations and I love that over the last decade we’ve seen some really amazing content that has allowed the consumer to be involved very directly in the decision-making process for companies and for brands. But social media can be fickle, (let’s look at Twitter for example, or even TikTok, where changes in leadership or the algorithms that circulate content aren’t always the most transparent). Also it may be unpopular, but I’m not into gimmicky content that goes viral one time and is exploited forever, I just don’t believe that’s a strong social strategy in the long run. Sure, it drives traffic to a brand from a reach perspective, but how many of those people are truly valuable toward your business goals in the long run? Jack Appleby from Marketing Brew explains that social strategy should be simple, and he lays out a four-question framework on how to pick your platforms and reach the right audience: “What are you trying to accomplish? Who are you trying to reach? What resources do you have? How will you measure success?” (Appleby, 2022), and I think these also help summarize the key points of where to begin.

What process do you undertake to determine where you should be? Are there points that make sense for knowing that you are on the correct platform?

Something that I prioritize in my organization is evaluating our  content KPIs and monitoring our engagement. As our lesson speaks to this week, engagement is so important, and the only thing I’ve learned is that you really have to understand your audience to find what niche content they resonate to and consistently provide it. That type of content stands the test of time. 

 I think that it is important  really look and listen at how responsive people are to you, what actions are they taking without your encouragment? Are they sharing your content? Are they messaging you? Are they commenting? What are they saying? Any time that you can provide value through a touchpoint, is a point that you should consider for the platform. Ask yourself, where is the noise already coming from and where does it make sense for my organization to be a part of that conversation. For a few years now, my orgnaization has employed a social listening strategy and that has really helped see where the volume of conversations are taking place, or as Hootusite summarizes, “social media listening tools allow you to build a solid understanding of exactly how customers and potential customers think about you by analyzing what they say on social channels. You can also learn what they think about the competition” (Newberry, 2022).

For example, for my organization, it just makes sense to focus on Facebook because people are already natively using that platform to connect with us on their own. Without being prompted with a CTA, members of our audiences already messaging us, sharing our content, tagging us in content, etc. They’re telling us they want and and expect us to be there.

What platform is the right platform?

I don’t believe in wasting time or energy (or even dollars) on platforms where people could care less about the brand or in our case, we don’t have the most robust  content creation machine or strategies in place to explore TikTok or BeReal or anything like that (we are a Marketing department of four serving an almost $4 billion bank). I believe in scalable strategy. Right now, for our current strategy, those platforms are just not where our converting customers are or even our employees (who we utilize as brand advocates). We can tell this by looking at our social traffic channels through Google Analytics, and monitoring our engagement and  metrics through our social media management platform and through the platforms themselves.  Of course, other social media channels can be used to “expand your audience and reach multiple demographics”, as the Dreamhost article for this week mentions (2021). However, when I was in bank marketing school, I had a content creator speaker that really hit home with his message that a bank that markets to everyone, markets to no one. I honestly believe with differentiation, a brand doesn’t have to be for everyone on all platforms. 

But it also depends on your goals as a business. I know that most of our conversion traffic on our website comes from organic Google search, so to make sure that I am doing everything I can to support that goal, I’m working on improving SEO. We also know that its important to drive in-branch traffic to our bank, so channels like Google My Business and reviews are great organic optimization tools because first, they’re free and second, they can help us drive traffic because of local search, and we know with some certainty that Google considers those things in the SERP ranking algorithm (Google, n.d)

What steps do you use to ensure that the platform is working for you and that it is the right process?

• Develop good content - Understanding what is relevant to your audience is key, what do they want from your business? How are you providing value? I always ask myself what value is my audience getting from this, if it’s educational, what am I conveying? If it’s informational, what should they do? It’s just entertainment, then how do I expect them to react? 

• Post and monitor consistently (whatever consistent is for your strategy) - Tracking your posting and your actions in a consistent way that makes sense can help you start to learn specific insights for your audience and what types of content they’re interested in. Stay relevant in the conversation and stay ahead of PR issues before they get unmanageable by monitoring your brand closely.

• Evaluate and analyze - Something we look at is tagging our social media posts with certain categories and themes so we can review all our content at the end of the year and see what format and what theme got the most engagement.

Also, do you test to see if the platform makes sense for you? This is often important also and the key is how you test.

We’ve run campaigns across platforms using different creatives and formats and that has acted as sort of an A/B test. And we’ve sort of done what Hubspot reports as a part of social testing which is “ test[ing] different forms of the same post simultaneously” … “[that are] measured by a pre-set goal” (Carmicheal, 2021). But more often than not, our team isn’t generating enough unique content to test multiple versions of the same thing on the same platform, but we will run similar messages with different creatives to the same landing page or goal and see how each performs against the metrics that matter for our company’s goals.

References

Appleby, J. (2022, October 12). A full social strategy in 4 easy steps. Marketing Brew. Retrieved November 2, 2022, from https://www.marketingbrew.com/future-social/stories/2022/10/12/a-full-social-strategy-in-4-easy-steps?utm_campaign=fs_in_mkbfp&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_source=crosspromo&mid=6f4f2409cb1d765ccbc84ce3600fa62d 

Carmicheal, K. (2021, September 7). The Ultimate Guide to Social Testing. HubSpot Blog. Retrieved November 2, 2022, from https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/social-testing#:~:text=Social%20testing%2C%20also%20called%20social,a%20boost%20in%20lead%20generation. 

Dreamhost. (2021, March 11). 6 reasons why social media matters for your website - dreamhost. DreamHost Academy. Retrieved November 2, 2022, from https://www.dreamhost.com/academy/why-social-media-matters-for-your-site/ 

Google. (n.d.). How to improve your local ranking on google. Google Business Profile Help. Retrieved November 2, 2022, from https://support.google.com/business/answer/7091?hl=en 

Newberry, C. (2022, October 17). What is social listening, why it matters, and 10 tools to make it easier. Social Media Marketing & Management Dashboard. Retrieved November 2, 2022, from https://blog.hootsuite.com/social-listening-business/amp/?gclid=Cj0KCQjwqoibBhDUARIsAH2OpWiw4KafBhAyHVVNCiJJoKdg4eUColc7iqz2yWaRyffm_zbXVsjp64UaAuhxEALw_wcB