Brent Closs—AVP Marketing, CAA Club Group
Creating a social media strategy starts with thinking about your organic versus paid social media activities. If you’re like me, your efforts can become a by-the-seat-of-your-pants activity—responding to requests, intermittently posting content and promoting your business to hopefully drive sales growth.
But a solid social media strategy is purposeful, clear and focused. It creates conversations, engages your audiences and demonstrates your brand proposition. How can you do that easily?
In trying to create social media plans, I realized social activities should be categorized. Using these categories helped my team identify the kinds of activities we wanted to focus on. It also made it easier to decide how we wanted to grow our social platforms to become well-rounded representations of our brand.
Appreciate – If somebody shares or supports your message, thank them. Find unique ways to recognize your customers. If you see something you like, let others know.
Create – Focus on creating content that’s uniquely you. Stand out and be memorable. If content is memorable and valuable, it’s shareable, and being shareable is what expands your audience fastest.
Curate – Share and react positively to what others are doing. You want others to engage with you, but are you supporting their efforts? Not all content has to be your own. If someone has made creative, valuable content, share it and add to the conversation by commenting on it.
Educate – Demonstrate your expertise by explaining the value of insurance, debunking myths and supporting the buying and claims process. Use platforms to deliver bite-sized chunks of relevant information.
Facilitate – Identify people who need help or need to be pointed in the right direction. Making things easier for people makes you memorable.
Generate – On social media you earn the right to sell something… occasionally. Use your organic social media efforts for sales generation sparingly. Save it for paid activities. Your social media platform works against your brand when you bombard people with sales pitches. Would you follow a company that does?
Reiterate – Not everybody will see your content when you post it. Create schedules so you can reuse content, but have enough that you’re not being repetitive.
Advocate – Support the causes, issues and goals that matter most to your customers and industry partners, organizations and charities you support.
As you grow your social activities don’t focus on all categories at once – just concentrate on a few. By doing this you’ll ensure your efforts are focused and consistent, and you can deliver consistently. Over time, you can add to it. By thinking about and categorizing your activities you can ensure you’re taking a balanced, holistic approach.