You’ve probably seen a local business in your area asking you to Like them on Facebook. Businesses all over America are starting to make a Facebook page in order to not be left behind in this age of social media.
Most of these businesses don’t actually have a strategy for these pages though and because of that, they fail at targeting their audience.
Take a look at what you’ve done for social media and find a way to engage your community and create a content strategy.
The Three Elements of Content Strategy
- Target your customers, audience or community with what they want to talk about and take part in conversations.
- Know where your audience talks online.
- Figure out which conversations become popular and why.
What Does Your Audience Want to Talk About?
The first step to developing a content strategy is to find out what words and phrases your audience is using while on social media sites. This process of finding out is called keyword analysis and there are software tools that are available to you to help you.
The three most popular analysis tools are Keyword Discovery or WordTracker which are two paid tools and Google AdWords, a free tool that uses data gathered to tell you what words and phrases are the most searched for.
Where is Your Audience?
Next, you need to figure out where best to engage your audience. It’s advised that you focus on one or two platforms to start.
Age and gender can effect where your audience is online along with what your presence is. To help you figure out where your target demographic is online, Flowtown is a site that has an infographic on social media demographics.
A quick breakdown of some sites:
- Facebook is a good site for B2C (business to consumer)
- LinkedIn is a great site for B2B (business to business)
- Blogs work for any audience
- Online video sites like YouTube can also work for anyone
Implement your Content Strategy
Here are some tips on working with your content strategy through various social media outlets:
Blogs: Blogging is a great way to speak to your audience as you have the ability to implement keywords right into your blog. This is beneficial for SEO purposes.
A good tool to help develop content is the Keyword Questions tool at WordTracker Labs. This will help you find out what keywords and phrases people are typing into search engines and you can then make blog posts out of them.
LinkedIn: Look through LinkedIn Answers and answer questions that focus on your keywords. This will build credibility with your target audience.
Facebook: Improve your following on Facebook and target your audience with questions that they want answered. Make sure these questions are based around your content strategy and your keywords.
Checking Results
In order to check your progress, you have to measure what your efforts are doing. Some easy ways to do this are to track: the amount of comments and Likes your Facebook posts get, how many followers, retweets and mentions you get on Twitter monthly, the amount of traffic your blog receives and the comments, and how much traffic is being referred to your website from your social media pages.
Creating a content strategy is about listening to your audience and understanding what they want. Building trust with your community will take time and you may have to change your content strategy as you go based on what’s going on in your industry.
SearchPro Systems
2024