When looking at creating a social media strategy plan, you first need to understand that a strategy is where you are looking to head to in the next few months, and the plan is how you are going to get there. So, how much time should you spend on your social media strategy plan?
When you look at creating a social media strategy plan, you will first need to know that it comes down to a simple, three-part concept; plan, implement, then measure.
To really understand how long it will take you to put your social media strategy plan into action, you will need to use a time-tracking tool, like Harvest. Harvest has a 30 day free trial, followed by $12 per month for up to three users.
Harvest allows you to create timesheets and projects, invoices, time reports and much, much more giving you the control to know where you are spending your time. Once you have inputted all the information, you will see where your time is being spent.
Basically, if you are going to spend 7 hours a week on your social media saturday, every monday you need to revisit your social media strategy to keep you focused and on the right track. This should take one hour. When looking at Monday-Friday, you are implementing your strategy which includes scheduling and creating updates along with engaging with your community. This should take one hour. Every friday, measure your success to see where you can improve and whether you are on track to achieving your goals. This should take one hour.
It really depends on your business and how much time you want to dedicate to your social media strategy. You may have hired a person to manage all social media, who can give 40 hours per week or you may be doing it yourself and can only allocate an up to an hour a day.
Taking a more indepth look at the three-part concept earlier; plan, implement and measure, here is what you should be considering.
Plan
When it comes to planning your social media strategy, you first need to decide what your core focus will be. Awareness? Increasing sales? Build loyalty? If you want to increase awareness, you’ll want to track your social media growth, engagement and increase in likes and subscribers. If you want to boost your sales, you’ll want to track click rates, sales and conversion rates and last but not least, if you want to build loyalty, you will need to track engagement, sentiment and influence.
Without planning your purpose for why you want to use social media, you won’t know how to implement or measure your strategy.
Implement
When implementing your social media strategy, you first need to look at content creation then building a community.
What kind of content are you going to be sharing on social media and how often? Implementing the strategy may seem like it will be very time consuming but using a tool like Hootsuite will help you save time by scheduling 90% of your social media activity (bar real-time conversations).
For example, I suggest that SME’s tweet 5 times a day which should include latest blog, news surrounding your business sector, product of the day and promotional news. How you share this is up to you however try and spread this out between 9AM-5PM during the week.
Measure
If you are using a scheduling tool like Hootsuite, you can measure how many click throughs you are getting on each shortened link. You can use Google Analytics to track most of your social media activity but for a more indepth look at visits, conversions and amplification, use a tool called sproutsocial which is a great social media management tool. You will get a 30 day free trial and will cost $59 per user monthly once the trial has ended.
Are you ready to better your social media strategy?