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Source: http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/15072-social-media-framework.html

Whether you are a startup or an established business, formulating and creating strategies for social media marketing requires thorough research and planning. For businesses that are starting social media marketing from scratch on the other hand, requires different approach.

Here is a checklist that can help even newbies to build a social media presence from ground up:

1. Setting your goals

• Prior to anything else, you need to know what you can achieve and which of these possible achievements are the most important and what you want to achieve most.

2. Competitive analysis

• Doing competitive analysis can help you jumpstart your own strategy by learning the following information from your competition: Competitor activity level, number of fans, types of content and more.

3. Audience

• It is important to know who your audiences are and what they want. For this, you can use data coming following to help with your research:
  • Google Analytics
  • Social media analytics
  • Information coming from your customer service portal

4. Social media handles

• Choosing the right social media handle is important because this is a part of your brand. However, with billions of users out there, you can’t always be sure that your chosen username is still available.

5. Choose the most appropriate social media network

• It is important that you choose the most appropriate social media platform for your business as it is not possible to give the same focused attention to every social media network.

6. Optimize your profiles

• Once you have successfully chosen the appropriate social media network for your website, you can start branding them to match your business. Be sure to add profile avatars, page covers and especially, add an optimized descriptions as they will show up in search results.

7. Set guidelines for your social media

• This is especially important if you are not handling social media yourself. Be sure to properly discuss these guidelines to anyone who may be handling your social media on your behalf:
  • the appropriate voice and tone
  • brand mentions
  • excluded topics
  • currency of information
  • proprietary information
  • discussing competitors

8. Your content

• Here are the top five most shared types of social media posts:
  • Photos
  • Opinions
  • Status updates
  • Links to articles
  • Personal recommendations

9. Content curation

• Because social media isn’t all about you, content curation can help you promote yourself while promoting other people, which is a good thing.

10. Streamline content length

• When posting on social media, you will need to consider and pay attention to the length of your posts to allow other people to put their own comments and quote your Twitter handle.

11. Find out the best possible timing for your post

• Updating your social media regularly and knowing the right timing for your posts is important. It’s worth knowing that your potential reach extends if you time your shares correctly.

12. Build a community

• Utilizing social media features can give you great benefits. Building a community for one, allows you to unite your audience around shared interest for easier reach and wider network.

13. Influencers, advocates and ads

• After making sure that your strategy is in place, you can now extend your reach by attracting influencers and advocates as well as using social media advertising.

14. Monitor and track

• To monitor when other people mention your brand or share and discuss your content, using reliable tools like Google Alerts, Talkwalker Alerts and Social Mention is important.

15. Review and tweak

• Always be ready to tweak and innovate your strategy. No strategy should be set in stone especially when something isn’t working. Always be sure that your current strategy delivers what you need. If not, go back to the beginning and look at your audience and goals again.

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