10 steps to improve your effectiveness on social media

The road to social media nirvana need not be as hard going as you think. This simple 10 step process will help you build a killer social presence.

So, you’ve got a website and you’ve got content. Your social channels are primed and ready for action. What you now need is a killer formula for creating social media updates that help you achieve your key business objectives. But where do you start? Let me help you out with that:

Step 1. Know what you want to achieve

Before diving straight into posting your content on social media, think about your business objectives. What are you trying to achieve? All of your activity on social media should help you achieve your key business objectives. If it’s not doing that, what’s the point?

Step 2. Know your audience

Once you know what you want to achieve, you need to work out how to grow and leverage your audience to help you achieve your objectives. Build audience personas and get to know your core audience. Find out their desires and needs. Can you meet their needs whilst achieving your objectives?

Step 3. Test the water

Now that you know your audience, you can test the water. By now you should have a good idea of what to post, to where and for whom. Play with things like posting time and try different headline formats. Make sure you’re regularly collecting data!

Step 4. Measure your effectiveness

Now it’s time to put that data to work. With a few simple spreadsheet exercises, you should be able to work out which posts resonate most with your audience.

Step 5. Create your formula

Now you have the data to create killer social updates and know how best to use them, it’s time to codify that. Try to boil the process down to one simple sentence. Apply that simple process to all of your future social updates.

Step 6. Test your formula

Now it’s time to reap what you’ve sewn by putting your formula to work. Run it for a long period to build an even more comprehensive data set.

Step 7. Tweak it

You’ve been up and running for a while and you should still be collecting data. Use the steps above to further tweak your process.

Step 8. Run it

Now it’s time to get your game face on. This is where you go from beta to release. Your social updates should already be delivering real value. Collect the data that matters most in terms of your business objectives.

Step 9. Measure it

It’s measuring time again. You should by now have a comprehensive dataset that should show a direct impact on your business objectives.

Step 10. Repeat it

Over time, things change and you’ll need to make allowances for that. Build the time into your schedule to continually revisit this process and keep your social media updates optimised ad infinitum.

In conclusion

Now you should have everything you need to start building a process for creating social media updates that really impact your business objectives. If you’ve got this far but want help delivering something special to your social audience, get in touch.