Developing a Social Media Presence as a Brand

Social media isn’t something that can be used in a haphazard manner when the intention is to build

a brand’s influence. Without a clear objective and plan, a social media presence can be anywhere from

ineffective to downright detrimental. The best solution to this is developing a Social media marketing

strategy, then going further and creating a social media marketing plan.

I’m still a little confused about what the difference is between the two. From what I can tell, the

social media marketing strategy is the established set of goals a company has for their social media and

how that fits into the overarching framework of the brand. The social media marketing plan is the actual

steps that need to be taken as well as the content and schedule for posting. 

Regardless, there are a number of steps that need to be taken before a company should even create

a social media account. The first step is to identify and create target market personas. This part is

essentially a very fun game of pretend. You take your target market and squish them into a few

stereotypes and make a name and personality for each of them. The personas take into account multipledemographic data, such as age, location, level of education, interests, income, hobbies, career, and

spending habits. Thinking about this from a consumer perspective is fun too, because all of us are

definitely the perfect character persona of one or more of the brands we endorse.    Another important step if a company is already active on social media is conducting a social media audit.

Collecting and analyzing data helps identify what’s working well and what needs

to be improved upon or thrown out all together. Once the strengths, weaknesses, and threats are

established, setting up goals, objectives and metrics is the next step. Any goals set pertaining to

social media should be measurable. It’s impossible to determine how effective social media is if

you make arbitrary benchmarks that don’t tie back to metrics. Some good pens are followers,

website/page traffic, number of clicks, likes, and shares. One of the biggest problems with

social media marketing is that you can’t always determine how much marketing efforts tie back

to sales, using metric-based goals eliminates some of the haziness.

Once all of this is settled, allocating roles and responsibilities to different team members will

get the ball rolling on a company’s social media marketing efforts. The important thing to

remember on this journey is to keep an intentional and uniform voice across all platforms,

regardless of who is writing. Cohesiveness should be the goal from start to finish.