5 Powerful Tools for your Social Strategy

Alex Jones 9 years ago

Anyone who is worth their salt in digital marketing and social media will apply the first definition to their social media efforts. Having a long term or overall aim is a very smart approach and a great starting point for any social media offering.

strategy
?strat?d?i/
noun

1. a plan of action designed to achieve a long-term or overall aim.

"time to develop a coherent economic strategy"

2. the art of planning and directing overall military operations and movements in a war or battle.

A social media strategy will outline how you are going to achieve your businesses goals and an ideal strategy should include these steps:

  • Audit of current offering
  • Content Development
  • Competitor & Industry Analysis
  • Execution
  • Evaluation

However, the second definition is something that we certainly shouldn’t ignore. Now this might be slightly over dramatising social media but, if you think about it, these military terms can be applied to what you can expect to experience when executing a social media strategy.

The ‘military operations and movements’ are what you’re posting, tweeting, snapping from your brand on social media but the ‘war or battle’ is what’s going on all around you – it’s competitor or friend activity on your customer’s timeline.

Theses battles can get quite noisy and violent, so how do you come out the victor? Well, luckily, there are a few powerful weapons that can help you not only win the battle but also the war.

The Armory

This list will provide tools that are relevant to each facet of a social media strategy and how you can fully utilise them to assist you in making a watertight plan of attack.

Mention

What for? Competitor & Industry Analysis, Execution, Evaluation

Mention is a social listening tool that shows you what’s being said on social and the wider web. By setting up alerts Mention tells you when a piece of content that would be relevant to you is shared by monitoring millions of sources from over 40 languages.

The real-time alert system is Mention’s USP but it can be utilised in different ways which makes it a very handy weapon to have for your strategy. You can connect all your different social accounts so you can react to the alerts without leaving the conversation.

Mention

Mention can also add value to the analytical side of your social strategies. It gives you understandable data of your mentions by source, language and other metrics. You can also generate reports and export them to help with your competitor analysis.

Facebook Audience Insight

What for? Auditing, Competitor & Industry Analysis, Content Development

Here at Zazzle Media we recognise how important this handy tool is and use it in every single social strategy we create. In terms of weaponry – this is our H-bomb. Available in the ‘Tools’ section of your Ads Manager, Audience Insight unlocks a huge amount of audience, demographic and behavioural data.

Facebook Audience Insight

To see information such as demographics, page likes, location, activity, household and purchase from within your audience type your page name into the ‘Connected to’ tab and watch it generate you a report. These statistics can be invaluable when you are auditing your current social media efforts.

Not only can you see and digest data about your own audience you can also see information regarding a specific competitor or industry. This can be brilliant in understanding and creating wider audience pools or for spotting gaps in the market. This is done slightly differently through the ‘Interests’ section.

Audience Insight can also be used to assist in content development. By looking at the information provided around what pages specific audiences like or their employment status, you can feed this into your content creation piece so you know that the content you’re creating will be relevant within your target audience.

For a complete guide to familiarising yourself with Facebook Audience Insight check out our own Naomi Parry’s beginner’s guide to Facebook Audience insight on HubSpot here.

Studio

What for? Content Development

At Zazzle Media we’re blessed with a fantastic design and development team that pretty much means, when it comes to content, if we can dream it we can do it. But we aware that not everybody reading this will have such easy access to world class design and development.

With this in mind we decided to include a tool solely for its content development capabilities. Studio is a design app that helps you create fun and powerful images easily. Designed to work hand in hand with Instagram we’ve found that you can use it to just as good effect with other networks.

Studio lets you easily add text, layers, filters and offers other design based opportunities that could prove quite costly if you were to use an external design team. Furthermore, Studio lets you view other people’s creations so you can take inspiration or ‘remix’ their designs into your own.

If you still need convincing Mashable’s take on Studio was this: “What Instagram did for photography, this app will do for design”.

Cyfe

 What for? Competitor & Industry Analysis, Evaluation

It shouldn’t be underestimated how important it is to align your social media strategy to other aspects of your business. None more so than direct sales and leads, especially to see if social has had an affect on these figures. So it is beneficial for you to have these figures all in one place – which is exactly what Cyfe does.

Cyfe

Cyfe is a very powerful tool that offers a varied number of features from a number of different marketing tools including Google Analytics and all major social media channels. Their social dashboard lets you connect your brand’s pages and pull in all encompassing or individual reports as well as other accounts – such as your competitors.

By having all this information, such as social engagement performance, sales and leads, you can clearly see where you are having the most success meaning it is easier for you to make informed decisions when it comes to evaluating the success of your strategy.

RiteTag

What for? Auditing, Competitor & Industry Analysis

This is our new favourite tool at Zazzle. We have found it so useful for our social strategies and also to help our clients understand the social space that they’re entering and how their customers communicate on social.

When developing a social strategy you need to know what your customers are talking about and more importantly how and why they are going to engage with you. More often than not this is achieved by well-chosen hashtags but which hashtags should you be using? RiteTag identifies trends that have had proven records of achieving results within your space.

RiteTag

For example, if we were to start researching popular trends around ‘fitness’ it then gives you a lot of top-level stats regarding the trend - as well as other sub-trends that relate to give you multiple different avenues of allowing you to not only find your customers but more importantly, for them to find you.

Let Battle Commence

These tools will give you enough ammunition to develop a comprehensive social strategy that will have you reaping the rewards of your careful planning. Of course, there are thousands of other tools that would assist in similar ways – and if you know any, please comment below with your suggestions – but these are a selection of our favourites.

So hopefully you’re now ready to lock and load and take on a social media strategy head on.

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