Why right now is the right time for a stand-alone social media strategy.

When we talk to our clients about social strategy one of the things we often hear is that their social media is on autopilot.   Meaning, they post somewhat regularly, engage with their community, promote their in store promotions and post their TVCs. It’s ticking along with nothing newsworthy to report.  The tragedy of this, is that it most often means that a brand is lulled into a false sense of security. They’re active enough on social media that to not raise any flags, however the results are lacklustre.

The missing essence of any autopilot social activity is STRATEGY. And, as Vince Lombardi once said, ‘hope is not a strategy’.

Without a strategy is the lost time and resource that it takes to produce tired or irrelevant social content. If it takes half a day to plan, write, create and edit a piece of irrelevant content to go live, that’s exactly the same amount of time it could take to plan, write, create and edit a piece of content that smashes it out of the park and triggers favourable consumer behaviour, aligned to a greater strategy.

So what’s stopping brands from developing a strategy?

We talk a lot about drawing a line in the sand and taking the time to audit all of our social decisions now rather than rambling on as we are for another 6-12 months. Our thinking is that we need to do it but the urgency will be greater later on, and we would have wasted precious head hours on our ‘social’. We encourage our clients to do it now, and trust the process. Often, what leads to inertia is a lack of guidance and knowledge.

Here are just some of the key questions to discuss to help frame your social media strategy:

  • Who is the brand targeting and what social channels is this demographic active on?
  • What role do my social channels play in the consumer conversion funnel?
  • How will I measure success and is the rest of the business aligned on this?
  • What is my brands value discipline and how can this come to life through my social media content?
  • Can my social media strategy be easily implemented by our team in collaboration with our agency?

Great social strategy is two sides of a great coin. On one side it’s got to be nimble, agile and transferable to the shifting sands of the community. And on the flip side it involves diving deep into articulating our vision and interrogating our communications strategy, brand positioning, audience, creative and community approach. Great social strategy stands the test of time so that in weekly, monthly and quarterly reports we still love it and it becomes our centre of gravity.

Contact L&A Social today to discuss your Social Media Strategy.