 Hi everyone, this is Sarah from System Dynamics and today we're going to go over how to begin creating a social media strategy. So what is a social media strategy? Simply put, it's a plan for your social media marketing that's going to outline your goals, how you're going to reach them, and how you're going to track your progress towards those goals. So the first step in putting together your social media strategy is going to be defining what your goal is. So setting clear and well-defined goals are going to help you stay focused and measure your progress and make better decisions about your social media strategy. It'll also help you set realistic expectations and then allocate resources efficiently and ensure that your social media efforts align with your business objectives. Let's go over what a successful social media goal is. An effective social media goal is specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound or smart. A specific goal focuses on a particular aspect of your social media campaign. For instance, promoting a new set of listings or increasing brand engagement with clients. These goals help you avoid vague targets and identify the exact outcomes you're hoping to achieve. Measurable goals are quantifiable even if you're discussing soft data such as brand awareness. You can track metrics like likes, clicks, comments, shares, and time spent on your page. These numbers give you an objective and a measurable parameter to evaluate your campaign success. Your social media marketing goals shouldn't be impossible to achieve. While aiming high is admirable, if your goals are out of reach you're only setting yourself up for disappointment. Defining achievable targets ensures that you're motivated and enthused to reach them. Your goals should also be relevant to your overall business strategy. Your social media marketing campaign should complement your other marketing activities such as email campaigns and other digital content creation. All of your marketing goals should align with your broader business goals. Time-bound goals mean that you are setting specific deadlines for particular objectives. Without a timeframe, it's challenging to measure progress and success. For example, you may set a goal of increasing client engagement with your page by 50% in three months. This target provides a benchmark and helps you course correct if you're not meeting your milestones. Creating an effective social media campaign starts with setting smart goals. Specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound targets provide focus and clarity, ensuring that you're meeting your business objectives. By taking the time to set smart goals for social media marketing, you'll see better results, increase your ROI, and have greater success in reaching clients and developing leads. Now, once you've set your goals, the next step is to decide how you're going to measure the success of those goals. Depending on what you've decided to accomplish with your social media, the metrics and analytics you want to focus on will vary. For example, if you want to increase brand awareness, there's a few areas you can focus on. One is post-reach or how many people have seen your posts since it went live. You can also look at audience growth rate or how many followers you gain over a period of time. Obviously, you can track these analytics directly in your business social media accounts. However, investing in a social media management tool like social dynamics can allow you to track metrics across all of your social media channels, as well as breakdowns for each individual platform. The next step in building your strategy is going to be to get to know your audience. How old are they? Where are they primarily located? What's their average income? What are their interests? It's also important to know what platforms they're on and which platforms they're not on. Identify what problems or pain points they have so that you can be the solution. It's important to know who your audience is so that you can craft your marketing strategy to be most appealing to them. On the flip side, it's also really important to get to know your competitors. Where are their weaknesses and how can you make them your strengths? Monitoring their pages and engaging in social media listening can give you the edge. Social media listening just means that you're keeping track of how many people are talking about certain brands online, whether that's yours or somebody else's. Keep an eye on brand mentions so you can see how people respond to your competitors and your own content. Knowing what your competition is doing on social media will help you identify gaps in the market where you can stand out. The next step in building a social media strategy is to do an audit of your pre-existing content. So if you're starting your social media profiles completely from scratch, you can go ahead and skip this step. But if you already have some content up on your social media platforms, you're going to want to do a social media audit. This consists of just a few questions and observations about your content. What's working and what's not? Who is engaging with you? What are your most valuable partnerships? Which networks do your target audience use? And how does your social media presence compare to your competition? Once you answer these questions about your current content, you can compare it to your social media goals and decide how to improve your strategy going forward. Once you've completed these steps, it's time to start brainstorming your content. Your brand and your voice in tandem with your social media strategy will serve as the blueprint for what kind of content you want to create. Use your goals to inform a kind of content you want to create and then go out and do it. It's super simple, it's super easy, and sticking with your social media goals and your social media strategy are going to be crucial when you're creating this content. Let's recap. So when we're working on our social media strategy, we're going to want to start with setting smart goals. Specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound goals. Doing this is going to set the standard for what our social media strategy is going to be. After we set our goals, we're going to want to decide how we're going to measure the success of those goals using certain metrics and analytics. Next, we want to get to know our audience, where they are, what they want from us, and we're also going to want to get to know our competitors so that we can fill in any gaps in the market. Then we want to do a social media audit of our pre-existing content so that we can figure out where we need to improve. And then after that, it's time to start brainstorming and creating content. That's all I have for this week's video. If you're looking to find more content about digital marketing, be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel here at System Dynamics. We upload videos every one to two weeks about how you can improve your online marketing strategy. All right, I'll see you next time. Bye.