Social networks… That small (or large) space that we can all create on the Internet to stay connected with family and friends, meet people, and why not, find out about good news.

Companies are increasingly taking into account the implementation of social networks as a complement to their digital marketing strategies, and networks allow many things:

• Drive traffic to your website.
• Make yourself known.
• Promote new products or offers.
• And perhaps the most important (well, they all matter) is to generate a community around the brand.

Although it may not seem like it, being on social media is not easy, it requires a lot of planning and time to create and execute the different social media campaigns and strategies; for all that is required, figures such as the have been created Community Manager which is responsible for the online management of the brand.

Social media can be used by everyone, and if you don't have (at the moment) the resources to hire someone to manage your social media, you can create and manage these strategies yourself, and that's what we're here for. On this occasion, we want to give you a guide or advice so you can create social media strategies that allow you to boost your brand.

Diagnosis of your social networks

This step is the basis for creating a good social media strategy. We must break down everything that has been done for social media: campaigns that have been carried out, what content has been posted, the response and interactions of users with our content, which ones offered the best results and which ones offered lesser results.

If you are just starting out in the world of social media, you should analyze your competition: what they do, how they do it, what they post, what they write, how they interact with users, what works for them, and what they are failing at.

The objective of this analysis is to discover your strengths, in order to enhance them, your weaknesses, in order to improve them, and your opportunities, which your competition may not be seeing, and to take advantage of them. In this way, you will know how to guide each of the points of your social media strategy step by step, which will help you achieve your main objective.

Define your target audience

It is very important to know who you are addressing, as this way you will find the right tone of writing, the right image, the right objective and the time that the message will reach them the fastest.

Perhaps this is best explained with an example: let's say you sell baby products. Although your products are designed for use by babies, it is the parents who end up buying said products, so you must create texts and images designed to convince the father or mother of the child to purchase said product.

You have to be realistic and you can't reach the entire general public. You should always create an ideal person who would buy your product, which is known as a "Buyer Persona." This involves creating a fictitious person, giving them traits such as age, sex, occupation, tastes and habits. This way, you can get an idea of the type of people who would buy your product and configure the message that would get through most easily.

Set goals, objectives and KPIs

It's not about being on social media just for the sake of it, but about achieving something. The objective answers what I want to achieve with my social media strategy: Sell? Attract customers? Make myself known? These are just some of the objectives you can set yourself when you're creating a social media strategy; you must be aware that these objectives must be specific.

Goals answer how I am going to achieve my main objective, what I must do to be able to achieve my main objective, for example, if my objective is to win a competition, my goals are to win the different games that take place during the competition and when I overcome them I will have achieved my objective.

Finally, we must measure the results of our objectives and goals, so you must select which key performance indicators (KPIs) you will analyze to determine the fulfillment of your objectives. Each social network can offer you its metrics, take advantage of them.

Define the available resources

This is where we need to define what we need to manage social networks. We know that creating a social network is free, but managing it is not. It requires a team of people to write texts, design, create videos and monitor the networks, and that team of people requires the appropriate tools to create content, and to have that technological and human team, capital is required to obtain and maintain it.

Also, if you want to invest in paid campaigns like those offered by Facebook Ads, you must also include this in your social media budget, so think carefully about what you want to do on your networks and whether you have what it takes to execute it.

Define the social networks to use

There are many social networks at present, and more may be created in the future, and each one works in a different way. It is not advisable to create all the social networks just for the sake of having them; it is best to identify the network or networks that suit you best and where your target audience is most present.

If you want to create a network of contacts, LinkedIn, if your focus is beauty and fashion, Instagram is the solution, if you want to give information in real time, Twitter is your friend, and Facebook, well, it is almost mandatory since it is one of the most used social networks and you can do many things on it.

Keep in mind the limitations of each network, this way you will know which content works best and you will design it so that your audience can consume it in a more enjoyable way.

Planning and creating a publishing grid

This is where the team (or you yourself, if applicable) will plan the main intention of the posts, the content that fits the intention, and the days and times it will be published.

When we talk about primary intent, it means what we want to do with those posts, such as driving traffic to our website, reinforcing our brand values, introducing a new product or offer, etc.

The content consists of:

• A visual part that can be a photograph, an illustration, a photomontage, a video or a gif. This part must be in line with the company's graphic line (colors, fonts, and values), and must be attractive to the user, prompting them to read the description.
• And the text or message, here is where we will explain the main idea, must be concise, well written and with good spelling. In addition, you must take into account how your target audience expresses themselves, and what words they use, in this way you will find the appropriate style and tone with which your users (and potential users) will feel identified.

Getting content out for social media can be difficult, but you can take advantage of important celebrations, promotional dates (like Black Friday), internal company events (image changes, new products, promotions, etc.) and you can even linkbuild with other companies and publish content they have created.

The day and time of publication is important, to find the right moment when your users will see your post. In this part, you should rely heavily on the buyer persona profile you created earlier to define when you are going to publish. A person who works in an office does not have the same time as a student or a housewife, pay attention to these factors and decide the best day and time to publish.

On most networks, it is recommended to post between 1 and 3 times a day, except for Twitter, which, due to its operation, is recommended to “tweet” between 4 and 20 times; this with the objective of not saturating our users with information and causing them to stop following us.

It is always good to be prepared for unforeseen events (whether good or bad) so include them in your planning list.

The importance of good planning is that it allows you to optimize your resources and make the most of them. You will know in advance what you need to create your publications and, most importantly, you will be prepared for any unforeseen events that may arise along the way.

Execution and evaluation

We have already completed each of the previous steps, and now it is time… It is time to put our social media strategy into action! Start publishing all the content of your strategies on the networks you had defined and let it take effect, it is important to give it time to obtain better data.

Do you remember the KPIs we defined earlier? Well, they are used at the time of evaluation. When your publication is online for a sufficient amount of time, the metrics will give us data that we must analyze, and see what worked and what didn't, which days and hours had more interactions and visits, and based on this data, we can optimize and improve subsequent strategies.

Social media management It is a job that requires perseverance and time, it is not something that happens in the blink of an eye, and it requires a lot of research to get the most out of your networks. If all this seems very complex, you can count on our help: at Gulupa Digital we offer our social media management service, and we will help you manage them properly.