Social Media and Strategic Planning

        Social media has been a large part of advertising for different companies since the major rise of social media in the early 2000s and with advertising comes the need for strategic planning. Successful strategic planning in social media requires research, careful planning, and great timing. These factors may sound very difficult to achieve, but thankfully there are several different websites and apps that can help your company’s social media posts be effective.

         Research is one of the most important steps in strategic planning because it is the time when you try to answer all of the questions involving the demographics that you are trying to influence, but sometimes finding information on these groups can be hard. I find that the Pew Research Center website is one of the most helpful tools to use when you are trying to find what platforms each demographic uses most, in fact I used this link to help decide where to post different posts on the various platforms of social media: http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/08/19/the-demographics-of-social-media-users/ . After you figure out where your audience is you need to research what posts get the best positive reaction from your demographic and general members of that social media site.

         Once you have your platform(s) for advertising figured out and what tone to use on the post, next you need to figure out what to say and how to say it. I would recommend that since you most likely know the general information that you are trying to convey, that you should use either the Facebook private message or Twitter private message settings to send a few samples to trustworthy members of the demographic you are trying to target. This gives you the opportunity to get feedback for what your ad appears to convey to them.

         After you have determined exactly what you are going to post, you must figure out the exact time you should post your information. If you post at the wrong time on your chosen social media platform(s), then you can risk being ignored by some of your target audience. Thankfully, there are some apps and internet extensions to help you determine when to post. You can use the Google Analytics extension on Google Chrome to track how many people view your posts at what time and from which country they are from. If you want to guarantee that your information is posted at the optimal time you can use the HootSuite website and app to automatically post your information at the best time for each platform.