You might be thinking it’s a little late for us to be telling you every detail of how you should plan your e-tail shop’s festive-season social media strategy, and you’d be right. Hopefully, you’ll have the key planks of such seasonal plans put down already.
However, it might still be handy for you to do a ‘check-up’ of your brand’s approach to social media this Christmas, before you launch the full campaign in earnest.
So, here are some of the key factors to be thinking about – or reminding yourself of – at this late stage.
Is your brand’s social media campaign well-aligned with its broader goals?
Whatever your business’s goals are for its social media channels, now is the time to re-familiarise yourself with them, as you’re planning your posts on the likes of Facebook, Twitter or Instagram for the month or so ahead.
And of course, those goals may well differ from platform to platform. It might be that your brand has a presence on certain social media sites largely to increase brand awareness, while on others, you may be seeking to distribute authoritative and useful content for your target audience, or to acquire new customers.
Whatever – you need to be sure of what your e-tailer’s precise goals are for each social platform, and to plan your seasonal social posts accordingly.
In the process, do what you can to make those goals SMART – specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound.
What is your social editorial calendar looking like?
The above goals will all be important when you’re putting together an editorial calendar for your brand’s social media presence. Such an editorial calendar should consist of a list of exactly what will be published on each of your social channels, and when.
By now, you ought to have this publishing plan already set out for the rest of 2020. So, have another look now at the mix of what you intend to post.
Does your editorial calendar look a little too heavy on one type of content, for example – such as memes or links to ‘how to’ blog articles – when considered alongside your aforementioned broader goals and the audience you have on that given social media channel?
Do you have a strong sense of who your audience is?
Every social network on which your brand is present should provide insightful statistics about your audience. So, before your Christmas social media marketing campaign gets significantly underway, it’s well worth spending a few minutes checking whether the actual audience you’re addressing on your social profiles is consistent with the one you think you’re aiming at.
If your store sells men’s products, for instance, you may be surprised by how strongly women are represented in your follower base on a specific platform like Facebook.
There are several reasons why this may arise. Your Facebook updates may not be very well-matched to what social content men are looking for in your sector, or your products might be largely purchased by women as gifts for the men in their lives.
You can determine what the situation is for your own brand by keeping a close eye on the demographics of your social followers on specific platforms, encompassing their age, gender, location, occupation and interests – among other things. This will then have implications for the exact social content that you produce.
Here at Piranha Designs, we provide social setup expertise as part of our top-level Platinum search engine optimisation and marketing package. It’s one of the key elements that will help you to get your ecommerce outlet noticed for the right reasons online. So, why wait any longer to talk about it with our UK and Gibraltar-based web marketing professionals?
