Crafting Your Social Media Messages

You know about the importance of using social media to engage your audience (just look at these stats!), but if you’re planning your social media strategy, where do you begin? Let’s look at the questions you MUST be able to answer before completing this task:

1. What Is the Ultimate Social Media Goal?

How will your success or failure be defined? There are many social media goals your team can use to define success. As always, making sure your goal is SMART is imperative. It is also important to make sure these initiatives fit in with the rest of your marketing efforts and that you have the tools in place to effectively track these metrics. Some of the metrics that can be used to track social media success are awareness, engagement, and reach.

2. Who Are Your Ideal Customers?

The age of one size fits all is long gone. People now expect a personalized experience on the web, and this also applies to your messaging. Before you craft any messages or decide on any articles to share with your audience, you must define what that ideal audience looks like. Creating buyer personas will not only help your entire marketing campaigns stay focused on who you are creating all this for, but it will also help you cater your social media messages to their interests. Knowing your audience will also help you decide which social channels to use for this particular goal, if you haven't decided that yet. And that brings us to…

3. What Channels Do You Plan on Using?

This could be a whole book of its own, but to keep it short... Deciding on which social channels to target will be imperative in order to make sure your message is crafted for that platform. There is a certain level of etiquette that comes with each social platform. Much like how your manners may change from when you are in your living room versus when you are in the office, you want to be sure to keep the platform in mind when you are crafting your message. Also, when you are making the decision of which channels to use, be sure to tie that choice back to the SMART goals and buyer personas we defined in number 1 and 2 above.

4. What Content Will You Use?

Along with knowing who you are talking to and through which channel, you need to know what you want to say. This will most likely correlate with our SMART goals above, but it's important to mix your content with others’ content. No one likes someone who is always bragging or promoting themselves. It is important to think through what pages and content you are sharing on social media, not only to correlate with your goals, but more importantly to provide the best experience and most value for your followers. How many of us have stopped following someone because all the things they shared were useless... I think many of us have been there. So make sure you are not that person.

5. How Will You Choose Which Images to Use?

Images are vital in order to compete on social media. "90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual, and visuals are processed 60,000X faster in the brain than text." Not only is it easier for people to consume visual content, but visual content has been shown to perform better on several channels as well. Each channel will have different specifications for images, but here are a few tools to help you create images for the top channels. Make sure that when you sit down to create these messages you have considered the use of visuals in you messaging and how that will correlate with your text. Also, don't shy away from creating new images just for this social media campaign in order to give it that extra push.

While there are several other very important aspects that factor into crafting social media messages, these are the first five to consider as you begin to write. You should already know most of these answers when you begin to draft the content you plan to share, but if you haven’t yet done so, make sure to define these clearly before beginning any copy writing. I will continue to outline the social media creation timeline in future blogs, but in the meantime, if you have any questions, please leave me a comment below.