A social cycle in social media marketing is simply a summary of the processes of every social activity of a brand on social media. Before, brands and businesses could wing social media campaigns on the fly. Just being present was enough.
But now, the social media world has become a lot more complex, so if you want your business to thrive, you must prepare to go beyond merely existing online to making more deliberate strategies. Don’t do this, and you’ll lose customers.
Here are six stages of developing a winning social cycle.
- Conception stage
Everything begins from here. This is where you develop the idea for your social cycle and establish your objectives, aims, and goals. I recommend the S. M. A. R. T approach. It is a favorite acronym for Specific Measurable Attainable Relevant and Time-bound framework.
- Research and Planning
This is the most tasking stage. It involves finding out all you can about your target audience(s) and researching on your competition. Odds are they already use social media. You’ll want to compare their approaches with your ideas, learn as much as you can and see if you can improve on or adopt what works for them. Conducting a competitive analysis aids in evaluating expectations, identifying opportunities and setting targets.
- Creation stage
Here, you can get down to scripting creative content that communicates and tempts your audience into interacting with you and your brand. Content could include visual, text, or video. This stage also involves setting up accounts and updating existing ones. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube have provisions for business accounts. Opt for these and tailor your strategies for each social network you sign up for.
- Publication stage
Content creation is just a start. Publishing the content continuously and marketing consistently is where it culminates. Publishing doesn’t just stop at posting the juicy articles, memes or catchy animations. You have to take steps further to promote them, optimize them for search and sharing. Sharing is most important in social media campaigns. It’s even more important than likes and comments as it makes for an exponential spread of content.
- Engagement stage.
Don’t just post, kick back and relax. If you’ve promoted your business well, chances are you’ll start a conversation. Don’t leave any comment unattended; no one likes to be ignored. By just being around and conversing with your audience, you’ll gain significant credibility
- Monitoring stage
Without continuously monitoring your efforts, you can’t know your progress. Without this, you cannot improve. Tools such as Google Analytics and Facebook Insights allow you to a kind of eagle’s view to track every bit of your social media activity. This will enable you to make an adjustment to strategies that aren’t working and keep doing the ones that are. Ultimately, you’ll need lots of tweaking to your digital marketing agency, social cycle cycling.
Junaid Ali Qureshi is a digital marketing specialist who has helped several businesses gain traffic, outperform competition and generate profitable leads. His current ventures include Progostech, Magentodevelopers.online.eLabelz, Smart Leads.ae, Progos Tech and eCig.
