Social media marketing is a rapidly growing industry. These days, many companies are realizing that they need to capitalize on social media in order to reach every corner of their audience with their marketing strategy. But what if creating and carrying out a social media strategy seems entirely intimidating to you? That’s where a social media strategist comes in. Read ahead to learn exactly why you’ll benefit from adding a social media strategist to your team sooner rather than later!
Airtight Social Media Strategy
A social media strategist’s main job is to plan, develop, and implement a social media strategy for a company, product, or service. Creating a social strategy requires identifying your social media goals, deciding what tactics you will use to achieve them, and determining how you will track and analyze the success of your efforts.
An adept social media strategist will know how to translate the company’s business objectives into social media goals. They will also know how to do in depth research in order to create buyer personas and really hone in on a target audience. Included in the research stage is also a competitor investigation, so that you can see what your competitors are doing well and what gaps you may be able to fill for customers with your own strategy. Finally, your strategist should conduct a social media audit of any social media you already have up and running in order to see how your strategy can grow and improve moving forward.
Once the main research is completed, your strategist will move on to the next step of planning which involves solidifying which social media platforms you will focus on and making sure that those profiles are set up properly. Then the strategist may suggest or set up a social media content calendar that can be used to regularly post on a recommended schedule.
As you can see, the main job of the social media strategist is to set up a plan that can be implemented with goals that can be measured. From this point, the strategist may hand things over largely to a manager, or they may continue to oversee the implementation process themselves.
Social Listening for Audience Research
Another major responsibility of a social media strategist is to engage in social listening. This is defined as monitoring social media channels for mentions of your brand, competitors, product, and more. Social listening is a way for your brand to track conversations about it and analyze customer’s behavior and response to its efforts.
If your product is a mobile fitness app, you might log onto Instagram and check your unique hashtag to see how people are using it. Or, you might check the comments section of a competitor to see whether their audience has any complaints about their app. These insights are crucial to continuing to improve your strategy. And social listening is a special form of research because this is where you are most likely to find genuine “influencers” who are fans of your product, or see people’s deepest complaints.
Social listening is a specific skill that takes a considerable amount of time and requires a different understanding from, say, looking at numbers on Google Analytics. For this reason, it’s very useful to have a social media specialist who can make social media monitoring in the form of social listening part of their everyday routine for the company.
Build Brand Recognition
One of the most useful aspects of social media marketing is its ability to raise brand awareness. Brand awareness can be described as the measure of how memorable and recognizable a brand is to its target audience. Social media is great for building brand recognition because it’s such a generally visual platform. Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok have a notably large focus on photo and video content, offering the opportunity for a social media post to give a lot of information about not just one service, but the company itself. What are your company’s core colors? What’s your go-to font? What is your brand voice like? This is something in particular whether you’re creating a Reel, static post, or even a tweet.
The stronger your brand awareness is, the more likely it is that more people will be able to find and recognize you. This is great for converting customers. Your social media strategist will have great insights into how to build a social media strategy that can increase brand recognition in alignment with your company’s goals.
Lay a Foundation for Social Media Management
As previously stated, the important step after planning a social media strategy is actually carrying it out through management. This involves creating, scheduling, and monitoring social media content that provides value and is in alignment with branding. It also requires keeping up with social media trends in order to incorporate them into a social media campaign when appropriate. In some cases, it also involves working with social media influencers to promote the company or brand through influencer campaigns. And management always involves monitoring social media analytics for ROI according to the initial goals set by the strategist. Not to mention, community management for the highest possible rate of social media engagement on posts.
This could be a job for one social media specialist who handles all aspects of social media, or it could be something that’s spread out amongst an entire department, with a manager overseeing content creation, scheduling, and analysis.
The Bottom Line
Whether you’re a larger company looking to rise to the popularity of Candy Crush, or a small startup with the goal of simply increasing brand awareness in order to convert customers, a social media strategist can help you. Social media is a big part of consumer’s everyday lives and a solid strategy can be the key to unlocking the market. If the idea of planning and executing a social media strategy completely overwhelms you, a strategist is the perfect person to partner with in order to make that branch of marketing more manageable for you and your company. You won’t regret investing in social media marketing for your product, especially when you begin to see the return on investments come to fruition!