So, you’ve realised social media is for you and your business but before you jump in head first, you need to build a strong marketing plan, without it you’ll just be wasting your time. Here’s a few things you need to know when creating an effective social media marketing plan.

Establish your goals

Marketing using social media services give you a wide range of goals, but you have to be specific on what you want to get out of it. Do you want to build your brand, increase engagement or promote a specific product or service? the choice is yours

Formulate your strategies

Now you know what you want its much easier to formulate a strategy that brings you closer to your goals. If your objective is to expand your social network to bring your brand closer to more potential customers, your first strategy would be to get more people to like your page or follow your account. You can do that by posting status updates and sharing content that would capture people’s attention and engage them in conversation.

Choose the right social media platforms

Choosing the right social media platforms are key to focusing your social marketing strategy, it would be really easy to join every network under the sun, however this might eat up a bunch of time and energy that could be used building your network on sites that matter. For example, if you’re after connecting with professionals and other business people, you’d want to sign up for an account with LinkedIn. If you want to get in touch with a much wider audience, then Facebook and Twitter are surely your top choices.

Monitor your progress

Lastly, track how well you’re doing. Just like analytics are important to monitor your website traffic, you need to know when your social media posts are getting the highest engagement and which social sites are giving you the most positive results. Using services like Hootsuite will allow you to automate your posts and monitor engagement. This way, you can further improve your social media plan.