The Recipe for Social Media Success

Since the launch of our social media consultancy in January this year, we've been having lots of fun training brands to become better at social. Here are some simple 'ingredients' that mix together to create a successful social presence and we'd like to share them with you. Whether you're an individual, small business or multi-national brand, these steps will be useful for you. Here's part one for you to enjoy...

Step I: Create a tailored strategy with clear objectives

The first step onto social is to create a tailored social media strategy. This strategy gives you the basis of a successful, engaging presence that really makes a difference to your online community. A strategy gives you a clear reason to be active on social, simple guidelines to follow and a helpful plan to achieve success!

Ask yourself the following four key questions to help you kick off your strategy outline...

1. What is your reason for getting involved in social media?

Maybe as an individual you'd like to express yourself more. If you're a small brand, perhaps you want to reach more relevant people, if you're large, maybe you'd like to communicate with your community.

2. What are your objectives? (Hint: It's not 'likes' or followers but engagement!)

This is particularly key if you're creating a social media strategy for a brand, you need to have a purpose. After establishing your reason for getting social, you now need to set some objectives to help you with your strategy so you can measure your success and have a clear idea of the potential ways you'd like to engage with your community.

If you're an individual these objectives may be as simple as 'to create an original, unique pin on Pinterest once a week' or 'engage with at least two of my key influencers on Twitter once a day'. We love to set goals whether they're on a personal or brand level!

3. What platforms (Facebook, Pinterest, etc) should you be active on and why?

It's crucial to look at resources and decide how much time and effort you have to put into creating a successful social presence. This will help you to decide which platforms are key for you to be active on. There's really no need for you to be on all platforms if, a) you don't particularly enjoy using them if you're an individual or b) if you're a brand, your target audience aren't using them. Lack of resources or commitment will only result in an ineffective social media strategy.

4. What are your key messages?

As a brand, you should be able to easily discover your key messages through your traditional marketing efforts and these positive benefits and features of your brand can, and should, transfer to social media. Establishing these messages will help you to create an interesting bank of content which is the key to high engagement rates and a successful presence... But that's a whole other blog post (coming soon)!

Individuals, your personal 'messages' should be those keywords, values and personality that reflects you and how you want to be portrayed on social media. As business-like as that may seem, remember your social media presence is your online CV and your activity will be monitored so try to keep it true to you!

Jane x

P.S. All images were created with A Beautiful Mess app which we reviewed earlier