10 steps to a successful social media campaign

At a time when almost every organisation has a presence online, either via websites or different social media platforms, the greatest concern is how to ensure brands are successful and visible online.

Jack Ndung’u, the Chief Executive at Internet Exposure Limited, has the following simple points to consider while establishing a presence online for a brand.

1. Do Thorough Research

Research is the very first step. Know your business, your industry and how best to handle it on social media. Check what other successful businesses in your industry are doing to be successful and maintain high visibility on social media.

Further, get to know your potential audience and what they discuss online. The more you understand these things, the better the position your business will be at nailing social media success.

2. Define Clear Measurable Goals

For your business to be successful in social media, define realistic goals based on the outcome of your research.

Make your goals very specific in terms of numbers. It is easier to follow through a goal to "reach a hundred people a day" than "reach as many people as possible a day" because you have something to work towards.

Further, these goals should specifically cover the number of posts you will put up on social media, days/time, how many people you are hoping to reach, how many times you are hoping to reach each of these people and the engagement you expect to get.

Engagement can be comments, retweets, likes, favourites, shares, link clicks and any other such action taken on your content.

3. Understand the Channels

Social media has very many channels nowadays and each of them is different in its own way.

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Vine, Google+ and Pinterest are among social networks that attract sizeable interest in Kenya.

However, people behave differently on each social network. For example, people are much friendlier and more engaging on Instagram than most other networks. People are more vocal about issues on twitter — and more irritable.

People are (as expected) very professional on LinkedIn. Facebook takes the cake for its being the most conversational network and so on.

Understanding each network and how it works will allow you to decide which network works best for your business and which tone to prepare your content in. Also, desist from the temptation to be everywhere if it makes no business sense.

The biggest mistake most businesses make is trying to do too much across too many social networks without measuring the Return on Investment.

4. Create Content in Advance

A content strategy is important on social media as it helps you define early enough what you will be telling your audience.

Creating a content strategy and a content calendar for a week or a month is recommended because it allows you to tell a story about your brand in a way that is easy to follow. If it doesn't make sense to you, chances are it won’t make sense to anyone else.

The content calendar with posts that go out each day (including the time) will allow you to review the content and ensure it tells your brand/business narrative the way you want it to be told and in a way that benefits the business.

Creating content in advance also guarantees continuity and consistency. Instead of worrying what you will put up each day, take an hour or two each week and create content for that week.

5. Schedule Your Content

Scheduling posts beforehand has various advantages:

a) You get to preview you content without any pressure. That way you can spot mistakes and avoid bloopers that we see businesses having on social media every day.

b) You eliminate the pressure of having to remember to put up content. This ensures consistency in your content flow and brand narrative.

c) You have more time to engage with your audience and monitor performance of your social media assets. Considering you are not creating content on the fly, you will have more time to monitor the performance of the posts and respond to your audience.

There are tools that also help you to schedule this content in advance like Tweetdeck, Buffer or Facebook's own native scheduling functions.

To counter the diminished human element that comes with automation, set push notifications for new interactions on your phone for faster response times. If this is not possible, you can check for any new interactions in predefined times like once every hour - or shorter depending on the number of engagements you get per hour.

6. Make Your Content Interesting and Engaging

Social media is mostly an avenue for people to let loose. That is where they go when they are not working so desist from looking too serious as much as possible.

Strike a balance between being professional and being intriguing. By being intriguing, your audience becomes more responsive.

Avoid overselling your business but instead, aim at having meaningful conversation with your audience to get them to respond to you. Simple tips to evoke responses from your audience include;

a) Asking open-ended questions that do not need a yes or no answer.

b) Tie in your content with real time events. Many brands have perfected the art of jumping into "hot" topics because users are more bound to engage with content that is in rhythm with current events.

c) Tag influential users in content that may resonate well with them. Usually, these users will either retweet or respond if the content resonated with them well enough which in turn gives you a lot of free visibility.

d) Freebies. Everyone loves free things. If you have anything to give to the audience, engage them in trivia or other fun way to decide a winner and you will in turn get a lot of engagement.

7. Use quality images and visuals

It is a well known fact that content is accompanied by images gets way better engagement on social media than content without. Therefore ensure you have good quality visuals for your content.

Also, ensure you visuals are either square or landscape — never portrait unless it is absolutely unavoidable. Most popular social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram display either square or landscape images (wider than they are long) and only parts of portrait images thus the reason why they are discouraged.

In your images, ensure your business/brand logo is clearly visible but avoid the temptation of adding too much text to visuals. Only use about 20% of the surface of the image for text.

8. Be Ready to Spend
The biggest mistake businesses make about social media is thinking that you can easily grow your visibility and audience for free. The second biggest mistake is thinking it costs a lot of money. Neither is necessarily true.

To reach more people and build your visibility, you have to be ready to spend and the good news is — it does not cost that much.

Facebook specifically allows you to reach more people using your posts for as little as $1 per post. Therefore with anything from a few hundreds to hundreds of thousands, you can increase your social media reach depending on your financial ability.

9. Monitor, Monitor, Monitor

If you want your business/brand to be successful on social media, monitoring and analysis is one of the most important factors to put on your to do list.

It gives you a true picture of how you are performing against your set goals and allows you to notice what kind of content works best for you. It also helps you understand the best performing times for your posts, best days, best audience groups to target and best interests to use to target your audience.

It also ensures you are on top of your game by making daily analysis of how well you have achieved your daily goals and also helps you change your plans if something is not working.

There are many ways to monitor your performance on social media using free and paid tools which you can easily get from your favourite search engine.

The key metrics to pay particular attention to are number of people reached, number of times these people have been reached (impressions), engagement rate (Calculated as (engagements/total reach)x100) ) and time/day for each metric. Also check performance of businesses/brands similar to yours to see how you match up.

10. Seek Professional Advice

There are many organizations/individuals that have vast knowledge of social media who can help you achieve your social media success goals.

Present your problem to them and ask for their professional advice and opinion on how you can achieve you social media goals for your business/brand.

It will save you a lot of time and even money by pointing you in the right direction or holding your hand own to ensure you learn the ropes as you implement the solutions until you are able to walk on your own.