Social Media Strategy for 2021
What better way to put out the dumpster fire that was 2020 and embrace the new year than with a fresh perspective on your social media strategy. Coming up: Part 1 on how to engage better with your followers on social media. Also, if you’re not engaging on social media, you’re not engaging. Now is the time to step it up.
For the purposes of this super informative blog post about social media trends for 2021 (#keywords), we are going to be talking about the power hitters: Facebook – Instagram – LinkedIn – and Twitter. And, what better place to kick this off than by…
Defining Your Target Audience
You may already have your target market and customer personas defined, in which case, it will be useful for you to know the main personas that are being served at each of these networks.
Facebook is basically everyone Millennial and up. (I took the liberty of linking a source that shows the generations by birth year HERE in the event that you don’t already know.) This market would be everyone but the younger generations are not sold on Facebook. They’re looking for a little more originality and don’t really want to have conversations online that will be subject to their grandma. Let me clarify, they are still in attendance but if your customer base is Gen-Y or Gen-Z, you will want to aim your focus on a network that caters specifically to them like Instagram, TikTok, or Snapchat.
Still, Facebook is a huge market. Worldwide it has 2.7 BILLION – with a B, monthly active users. It’s algorithm for reaching just the right niche in its social advertising is unmatched. Where Google is unmatched for finding new customers with keywords, Facebook finds potential customers with interests and with online behavior. With that in mind, all content types do well here – video, links, images, text – and all intersectional demographics are present.
Instagram is for visual content. If your business produces great visuals: images, video, or the like, you should be all over this one. And even if that’s not what you DO, per se, if you have the capability to produce great visual content, Instagram could really help you spike your engagement. Even though you aren’t able to share links (thumbs down), engaging with your post is as simple as a quick double tap (thumbs up).
LinkedIn is all B2B. Highly motivational and trying hard to be inspirational; all high fives and business relationships. From a professional perspective, if you do business to business work, do a lot of hiring, or consider yourself an industry leader/influencer you should definitely be present and active on LinkedIn.
Finally, Twitter. I think of Twitter as a brand ambassador. No better way to define your brand personality than by engaging with people through conversations. Twitter makes you get to the point, short and sweet in 280 characters or less – that’s never stopped people from writing stories on Twitter, but I digress.
Making a Plan for Your Sharable Content
Knowing where to be is only half the battle. Knowing HOW to engage your customers is where you want to put some extra thought. Looking at your customer personas, ask yourself some of these behavioral questions:
- Do your customers/clients/followers like memes?
- Do they want links to reputable data sources, studies, and research?
- Do they spend their downtime scrolling through short, fun videos?
Once you’ve defined these target metrics, decide how each specific network will be used. For example:
On Twitter
- we will share company updates, news and information (what)
- we will @ mention clients and #hashtag whenever possible in both relevant and fun ways (how)
- we will only post when we have relevant updates to share or in conversation with customers (when)
- person A is responsible for sharing updates, Person B is responsible for monitoring and engaging (who)
On IG (that’s slang for Instagram)
- we will share finished project videos and photography (what).
- approved photo filters are Lark, Crema, and Perpetua (how).
- we will post to our IG Story at least once every day (when) and we will store relevant sharable content on XYZ drive for accessibility(where).
- person A is responsible for project posts, Person B is responsible for Story content (who).
Why? Because data has shown that being consistent is the most important factor in being relevant (and staying visible) on social media.
TEASER: we have more tips on being engaged and how to bolster that engagement coming up in our follow-up post The Power of Engagement.
What can you take away from this? Do you need to need to more clearly define your target audience? Will you set up expectations for each social network? Find us on one of the aforementioned social networks and let us know how you plan to revise your strategy for the new year!