Once upon a time, social media was really just a way to connect with friends or family – to share news, photos, and important updates. While major advancements have happened since the days of social media’s conception – those fundamental values should be at the core of any social media strategy.

At Neff, our social media strategies are custom created for each client’s personal needs and goals. To find the perfect roadmap, we start by asking ourselves the following questions.

Who’s Your Audience?

While many social media practices overlap from client to client, one size strategy does NOT fit all. It’s important to first understand the audience or desired audience of a client. This can help our team determine which social media platforms best fit the brand in question.

Is your company B2B? LinkedIn will play an integral part of your brand’s story and social media strategy, allowing the right content to get in front of the right eyes. Is your brand sought after by a younger demographic? Platforms like Instagram, or even Snapchat or TikTok, will be crucial for reaching the right audience.

Once you have your audience defined, you can tailor your content to that specific set of people. It’s easy to fall victim to social media trends and viral content, but it’s important to make sure your content fits the person you want to reach. Keeping your audience top of mind will always help keep your platforms on track.

What’s the Brand Goal?

Some brand goals are simple. A retailer may have a straight-forward objective like ‘sell more product’ while another could have a slightly more complex goal, like ‘reach a new audience or expand our product offering’

At Neff, we believe communication is key. By understanding our client and the goals they wish to achieve, we can better build out our strategy and determine the right content to share on their social media channels.

For a client that wishes to grow their audience, we can test methods such as social media advertising, and more basic, but effective, actions like engaging with the local community and sharing user-generated content.

With social media growing and changing every day, there’s always a new path we can carve out to reach a brand’s overall goal or goals.

What are the Competitors Doing?

Imitation is the highest form of flattery, right? We’re not saying you should copy and paste a competitor’s content but analyzing the social channels of others in your space will help give you a leg up on the competition. Especially helpful when starting social channels from scratch, looking at what the competitors are doing well or poorly will help determine what sort of creative you should include in your social media content and how to tailor it to your particular client.

How Can We Grow?

Social media growth doesn’t always just mean gaining a larger following. We measure growth by a few factors, such as overall impressions and engagement rates.

When it comes to growing an audience, tools like social media advertising, influencer features, and community engagement are tried-and-true methods to reach a wider audience and hopefully get more people to click that ‘follow’ button.

An often-overlooked strategy is really examining your content and what’s performing best. By looking at top content (and poor performing content), you can determine how to continue to optimize your social platforms and create content that will increase engagement. Increased engagement leads to more newsfeed visibility, which is vital to growth.

The work doesn’t end after a post goes live. Analyzing your social channels should be a main part of your evergreen strategy to continue to grow the visibility, size, and credibility of your social media presence.

#neffknows