Episode 188 - Setting up Your Social Media Strategy

Custom Apparel Startups

What is a social media strategy?

A social media strategy is an outline or plan of your social media goals, how you will achieve them, and how you’ll track metrics.

Social is talked about all the time in business, but do you need it? If yes, then how will you use it? This episode is all about finding out what is right for your business.

Why having a presence on social media is important for small businesses:

• Maintains and builds relationships with customers you already have
• Grows brand awareness and familiarity
• Builds trust with new and current customers
• Builds engaged communities
• Turns customers into advocates (gain mentions, comments, likes, tags, etc.)
• Gives your business a chance to respond to any negative feedback
• Another channel to promote products or services

How to set up a strategy

1. Determine a goal – make sure it’s measurable/realistic for your business (ex: increasing email sign ups, increase web traffic, generate sales/leads, etc). Understanding and researching your competition can help you.
2. Understand your audience – Know the basics about your target audience like age, location, income, interests, etc. Which can all be found using that platform’s analytics tool. This can help you build better strategies and goals based off that data. Also know things like what kind of content do your customers engage with? What accounts do your customers follow? What do they like/share?
3. Get to know your competition – Complete a competitive analysis to help you understand what your competitors are doing, what their strengths/weaknesses are. Or keep an eye on their pages, search relevant keywords and how your competitors rank, etc.

Start Implementing Your Strategy

• Determine which platforms you want to use and are relevant to you (Instagram for reels, TikToks for short videos, Facebook for customer service, etc)
• Set up your profiles (use consistent branding like logos and brand colors, fill out bio completely, use high-quality images, include keywords people may associate your business with, etc)
• Create a social media calendar to help organize content ideas, scheduled posts, and maintain consistency
• Have your first couple of posts planned out and ready to go live

Who are you selling to? What is your niche?

• Should social media be a place for you to sell, or just display your products?
• What would you be able to show off?
• What do you WANT to do on social media?

Learn about your potential audience / customers

• Does your audience make purchasing decisions from social media?
• Can you reasonably work with your customers or influencers to promote your product?
• Which platforms make sense for your business?

Research your competition or other similar businesses

• What are they doing?
• Do you want to do what they’re doing or something different?

Determine your strategy

• Do you want to sell online?
• Do you want to have customers find you on social?
• Are your pages for building trust?
• Are your pages just an online portfolio?

Define your brand

• What do you want to look like?
• What is the personality of your brand?
• Who is your audience?

Set up accounts / profiles

• Images
• Descriptions
• Initial Posts

Create a social media calendar

• When will you post?
• What will you post?
• Will you go live?

Collaborate with others

• Engage with people in comments
• Connect with customers on their social accounts
• Cross-promote when possible
• Follow and connect with potential influencers

Experiment with new ways to engage

• Contests
• Ask opinions (This or that? Which is your fav?)
• Boost posts (pay to get more views)
• Do you have customers that can promote your pages?
  • e.g. if you work with a school maybe do a # contest for free swag
  • e.g. if you work with another small business, cross-promote each other or share a contest. “Win X from me and Y from them.”

Track performance

• BE PATIENT
• Look for interesting wins
• Try to re-create what has worked before

Extra Social Media Tips/ Ideas

After your social media accounts are created, keep a few things in mind:

• Experiment with style of content: Post polls, stories, contests, cross collaborations (mention nails), boost posts, customer success stories.
• Don’t post too much or too little. One can seem annoying and overbearing while the other can seem lazy or like the brand doesn’t care.
• Get your team on social media, which helps with keeping track of any messages, mentions, or comments.
• Search popular hashtags/ keywords to use in written and video posts.

Using Social Media for business isn't just as simple as posting cool pictures and getting a million followers. People who have 'gone viral' as a rule didnt get there by accident. They spent a ton of time interacting with the platform, creating content, posting like crazy and working hard.

Make a smart business decision on how YOUR business will use social media and go for it!