Trying to figure out your social media strategy for 2022? Well, good! Take this chance to plan ahead.

The evolving landscape of competition, content, and networks makes a brief strategy more important than ever to ensure you don't waste time or resources on irrelevant efforts. It's for this reason that I created an in-depth guide on how to create a social media marketing plan from scratch.

The following guide will help you with social media marketing, whether you're new to it or want to double-check your goals in 2022.

1. Set Realistic Business Goals

Here's a quick question to get things started:

“What are your goals for social media?”

Setting goals is the first step in planning a social media strategy. According to the Sprout Social IndexTM 2021, the most common goal for social media is to increase community engagement (41%) and brand awareness (58%) for companies. Taking time to define your social goals is a first step to reaching them, regardless of whether you want to build a larger following or a more active community.

You will need to dedicate time and energy to your social media marketing campaigns regardless of your goals.

A Sample Strategy For Social Media In 2022 And Beyond

Of course, "realistic" is the keyword here. As a general rule, we recommend taking on smaller social initiatives that are both reasonable and affordable. The following are some sample business goals that any business can pursue:

Increasing awareness of your brand: This is the process of spreading your name more widely. Don't only publish promotional messages if you want to build your brand over time. Your content should first reflect your values and personality.

Increase sales and generate leads: You won't find followers buying by accident, whether they purchase online, in-store, or straight from your social profile.  Are you announcing new products or promotions to customers, for example? Do your social profiles integrate with your product catalog? Does your social media presence offer customers special deals?

Make your brand more visible: Your brand needs to be introduced to people who are not yet familiar with it in order to attract new followers.

Enhance community engagement: A recent Index study found that brands that engage their audience on social media are regarded as best in a class by 46% of consumers, so don't neglect to explore new ways to grab your current fans' attention.  Be adventurous with your content and messaging. Are you promoting user-generated posts and hashtags?

An engagement rate increase can be gained by as simple a question. Only if you're giving your customers something to do can you count on them to be your biggest cheerleaders.

Promote your website: Not difficult at all. Using social media can help you generate leads or drive traffic to your website if you have a clear focus. You can better determine your ROI from social media when you keep an eye on conversions and URL clicks, whether you are using promotional posts or social ads.

There is no right or wrong combination of these objectives and you can use any combination to learn which networks to target. Rather than complicating your social media marketing strategy with too many objectives that could potentially distract from the overall objective, keep it simple. Decide which objectives to focus on and rally your team around.

2. Do Your Research On Your Target Audience

Marketers should avoid making assumptions. In spite of this, only 55% of marketers take advantage of social data to better understand their target audiences. Your social media marketing strategy can be influenced by knowing a lot about your audience. It just takes a little bit of knowledge about your target audience.

Marketers can research their audiences quickly if they have the right tool. You do not have to be a data scientist or a market researcher to do so.

Different Platforms Attract Different Audiences

Let's take a look at today's social media demographics, for instance. By knowing these numbers, you can decide which networks your brand should target and what kind of content to produce. In your social media marketing strategy for 2022, here are some key ideas:

• A large number of people on Facebook and YouTube generates high revenue from ads.
• Top-ranked social networks for Millennials and Gen Z include Instagram and YouTube, a sign that their content is bold and eye-catching.
• Pinterest is a site dominated by women. It has the highest average order value of any social shopping site.
• The user base on LinkedIn is well-educated, making it a great source of specialized content that might not be on Facebook or Twitter.

3. Define Your Most Critical Metrics And KPIs

Data-driven social media strategies are essential regardless of your industry or goals.

By focusing on the metrics of social media that matter, you can achieve this. Analyze data that directly aligns with your goals, rather than focusing on vanity metrics.

How do we define metrics? Here are a few examples:

• Reach: You can measure your post's reach by counting how many unique users saw it. Do your posts appear in your audience's feeds?
• Clicks: This tells you how many times people have clicked on your content. To understand what drives customer curiosity or encourages them to make a purchase, tracking clicks is essential.
• Engagement: Multiplying the number of impressions by the number of social interactions. It gives you insight into how well you are perceived by your audience and if they are interested in interacting with you.
• Hashtag performance: Which hashtags did you use the most? Which brands did you associate the most? This information can inform your content priorities going forward.

• Organic and paid likes: This type of interaction goes beyond a routine Like count. Brands often turn to ads when organic engagement is so hard to obtain. When you understand these differences, both your advertising budget and your time investment will be more productive.
• Feelings: User reaction to your brand, content, or hashtag is measured using this metric. Were your recent campaigns offensive to your customers? Does your campaign hashtag evoke any particular feelings? The best thing to do is to take the time to learn about how people feel and talk about your brand.

Social media marketing strategies need numbers to be effective. To that end, you must put those numbers in their proper context.

4. Make Engaging Social Posts (And Curate Them)

There's nothing surprising here. The key to success with social media is content. Based on your goals, audience, and brand identity, you should know pretty well what to publish. As for which networks to cover, you probably have your own preferences.

Do you have a content strategy? Find some inspiration and ideas below.

Stories and time-sensitive posts

The stories won't stop. Story-style content appeals to your followers' FOMO (fear of missing out), and is interactive and not to be missed. The content will overtake the feeds of your followers by default, allowing your brand's account to stay at the forefront of your audience's minds.

Short-form video

Videos are rated as the preferred content type for achieving social goals by 54 percent of marketers, and this is not surprising. Social video is exploding, thanks to the growth of Instagram Reels and TikTok. As long-form and short-form content dominate social media on all platforms, their high engagement rate continues to get the most traffic.

Humanizing your posts

The importance of personal and personable content cannot be overstated as we manage to come out of COVID-19. Remind people who follow you that you're a real person.

5. Maintain A Timely Social Presence

Marketers today are arguably more concerned with timeliness than ever before. In addition to regularly posting new content, you need to be available for your followers always.

It's not always possible to expect customers to operate on your timetable. With limited resources or a small team, meeting deadlines can be a challenge.

Check out these tips for maximizing your schedule and social time.

When to post for engagement

What are the hours at which your brand is available to engage and interact with customers?

Late in the evening is sometimes suggested as a good time to post. Nevertheless, "preferred time" posts are useless if no one is around to respond?

You should instead try to make sure your social media management team is available to address any questions or concerns you have when you Tweet or post. Look into the most appropriate time to publish your social media posts. Keeping your audience engaged after posting is equally important.

That brings us to our next point.

Get back to your customers as soon as possible

Customer service should be quick. A strong brand on social media is defined by great customer service, according to 47%.

Building a brand's community relies on these factors. Making sure engagement and conversation opportunities are not missed requires effort.

Engaging your audience and being present on social media will earn your brand's respect. This is why social customer support for brands is so crucial if they want to raise awareness - great service spreads quickly.

Business owners should not leave their customers hanging by not responding to compliments or questions. Social media is consumers' preferred method of sharing their feedback and contacting them with service issues or questions. You may not know this, but 92% of users think brands should respond to social media messages within four hours?

Whether you're a team of one or 100, assigning specific response responsibilities can help your staff run smoothly.

With social algorithms continuing to evolve, organic content has a harder time reaching your target audience. In order to get more leads down your marketing funnel, you can't ignore those who engage.

6. Continually Improve What's Working And What's Not!

The big picture should now be clear to you.

As for your strategy, you should be able to change it as the year goes along.

A campaign's performance can never be determined without continuous analysis. When viewed from above, social media activity can be seen in perspective. Consider your top performers when designing campaigns and adjust them accordingly when your content stalls.

Many social media tactics are trial-and-error techniques, there is no doubt about that. Monitoring your social media marketing campaign metrics in real-time lets you make small adjustments rather than making sweeping, time-consuming revisions to your strategy.

Being diligent about your data is crucial to social media marketing success. Taking a proactive approach to your next strategy overhaul can allow you to capitalize on the results of your current campaigns in the short term. In addition to sharing insights from social media with coworkers, reporting data is also important for team collaboration.

Are You Ready For Social Media Marketing In 2022?

Modern social presences include many moving parts, as this guide illustrates.

Having said that, creating yours doesn't have to be difficult. When it comes to social media marketing, setting actionable goals and addressing each of the steps above will get you far ahead of the curve.

In addition, if you're looking for ways to make sure your social media marketing strategy is actionable, take a look at our social media marketing toolkit. We wish you success in 2022!