Social Media Strategy: where to begin?
By Marieke Van de Rakt for Yoast SEO. Original here.
Social media are a necessary part of any marketing strategy, but they should also be a part of your SEO strategy. As social media become more popular, Google and other search engines can’t ignore them any longer. Tweets and Facebook posts don’t get the highest rankings in Google, but Facebook pages and profiles for sure do. But how do you know which social media to use? In this post, I’ll walk you through the first steps of determining a social media strategy: finding the social media that suits both your business and your audience best.
Which social media suit your business?
The first step in determining a social media strategy is whether that social medium is one that you’d want to be found on. In other words, does the social medium suit the message and branding of your company? And on top of that: does this social medium offer the options and reach you’re looking for?
Social media like Facebook and Twitter offer a lot of ways to advertise and make your brand and company known beyond the scope of your followers. With other social media, this can be more difficult and would require a lot of hard work to get the same results. Make sure to think about what presence on the considered social media would mean for your company. Make sure that this aligns with how you want your business to be branded.
Which social media does your (desired) audience use?
Different kinds of people use different kinds of social media. So you have to know what social media your audience uses. And for you to know that, you’ll have to get to know your audience. This requires some effort and research, but it will definitely be worth it. For instance, if your company mainly works in the business-to-business area, you should definitely be active on LinkedIn. And if you have a young audience, your business is best off using social media such as Snapchat, Vine, Tumblr and Instagram:
Social media you can’t ignore
At the moment there’s basically only one social medium you really can’t ignore and that’s Facebook. Why? Let me show you:
Facebook currently has nearly 1.5 billion active users every month. That’s over 20% of the entire world population being on Facebook at least once a month. So you can see why this is one bandwagon you’ll want to get on.
A blog or website should thus definitely have its own Facebook page. And your posts should all be shared on Facebook. That way, all the people who follow your page see new posts in their timeline. WordPress can do this automatically for you when you publish an article. Some people will like, share or comment on the Facebook posts, giving them even more exposure.
Think about your social media strategy!
The main thing you should take away from this post is that you should determine your social media strategy, before your start. It’s easy to waste time, effort and money on the wrong media and/or the wrong goals. So bear in mind these 3 key questions :
- Who do I want to reach with social media?
- Which social media suits my business?
- On which social media do I find my target group?
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