When this year kicked off with an entirely new normal, social media grew to become an even greater phenomenon. Despite having made plans, many brands could not have predicted how fast current events would sweep up the global market, conversations and behaviours. From COVID-19 to the Black Lives Matter movement, our world has entered a new era in which social media is governed by new happenings (which require new strategies).

Here are few social media trends that you need to be aware of in 2021 :

• Social media videos are having big impact and strong influencing power in audience and consumer’s behavior.
• The average time-spent on tik tok has grown 210%
• Social Commerce will be a norm in the future, most of the people will purchase products through social media networks.

Reevaluating planned campaigns and contents, assessing evolving customer needs, planning for the new normal, and re-strategizing all previous works are a must for any brand looking to come out of this pandemic alive, and fortunately, we decided to outline how you can do this as a brand, in this free read.

Assessing On-going And Planned Campaigns

Before you make a move, obtain a realistic view of your starting position. Give yourself some room to breathe while evaluating a new plan.

Firstly, take a look at what you have planned to launch in the coming weeks and months. Ask yourself, do all these activities still make sense to your brand’s goal? Are they suitable in today’s environment where people are conscious about their finances and well-being? Which ideas shall you keep (and which shall you postpone)? Consumers will most likely be sensitive to issues such as health and safety, which means your brand’s content planning should have aspects such as positivity and responsibility mixed in.

As a creator, always think from your audience’s perspective: which emotions of theirs would they like to have reflected back to them? How might you be able to satisfy their needs using social media during this time? What sort of relief are they looking for when scrolling through their feeds? What might they be typing into Google during this pandemic? For example, according to BrandWatch, “how to” phrases have been mushrooming on search engines. Dalgona coffee and burnt cheesecake are definitely worth blogging.

Study Your Audience And Change Your Strategy

Social listening is one of the greatest tools you can use to gauge customer sentiments and identify your audience’s main interests and concerns. Listening is about understanding broad conversations around major happenings (online too), crisis situations, and more.

As customers are spending more attention on social media, demonstrate how you understand their needs and show your support throughout these tough times. Prioritize creating connections and customer care over pushing for sales to create sustainable brand loyalty.

If you really aren’t able to postpone a product launch or sales campaign, consider using your time to drive brand awareness and gain a wider reach (more followers).

The 6 Steps Social Medis Strategy Frameworks That Gets Results

At most your 2021 social media plan have been disrupted. However, we should always think on the bright side because there’s always an opportunity to focus our brand vision and have a reset on your business goals. So, shall we start?

1. First, evaluate back the success of your social media activities in 2020 and year-to-date.
2. Set a new social media marketing strategy for 2021 based on the projection for this year’s performance.
3. Discover the resources needed to achieve and succeed.

When you have a clear view after the above planning, let’s kick start the rest and encompass a successful social media strategy.

#1 Set Social Media Goals

Set your social media goals based using the basic SMART method. Your goal should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound. Besides that, social media as a platform is human-centric, which means your part of your goal should include enhancing customers’ journey (audience-oriented). Other goals include:

Awareness – Consistently reach out to capture customers’ attention

Conversion – Consistently engage in marketing efforts to drive customers’ action

Advocacy – Retain loyal customers by encouraging brand love

Start by setting big goals. Break down your goals with monthly and quarterly KPIs so you can track performance from time to time.

A few examples of social media KPIs you can set:

• Frequency – Number of posts published
• Audience Growth – The growth of your followers and fans
• Reach – Organic and paid reach and impressions
• Engagement – Interactions including likes, comments, shares and views
• Traffic – Quality visitors drawn from social media
• Lead Generation – Leads generated from social media

#2 Identify Target Audience

1. Your Valuable Customers – Think of your customers as your primary goal. Build a better relationship with customers and expect the greatest return from your social media investment.
2. Your Aspirational Audience – They refer to your future fans—people you want to turn into followers.
3. Your Influencer Advocacy – Some audiences not only follow but help lift up your brand by passionately speaking out about it. If you can win influencer’s hearts, you have unlocked media and traffic for your brand.

Now that you have confirmed your target audience, describe them at a deeper level—Who are your customers, really? In short, what is your “customer persona”?

#3 Establish Your Channel Strategy

Identify the right platform for your brand:

1. Primary Channels For Organic & Paid Content – Your primary social media channel is where you focus most of your effort on building an online presence. Most brands have around 2-3 primary channels. Prioritize which channels are most suitable for you to implement your content strategy based on your industry and platform research.
2. Secondary Channels For Future Growth & Opportunities – When your audience starts using a new platform, get 20% of them to be part of your experiment in tying out secondary channels for growth and opportunities.
3. Channel-specific Feature To Improve Performance and Engagement – Whenever a platform comes out with a new feature, don’t be afraid to try it out as a part of your engagement process.

#4 Craft Your Effective Content Strategy

Organizing your entire on-going content strategy or one-off campaign requires a social media framework. Your social media content blueprint should be broken down into 3 components:

1. Content Purpose / Objective – Have an overarching idea or purpose for your social media content marketing plan.
2. Content Pillars – Plan your social content pillars, imagine these as the building blocks for all your supporting content ideas.
3. Content Sub-topics – Underneath the content pillars, share more specific content topics.

Example of Social Media Content Topics:

• funny content that makes people laugh
• Valuable content that helps people learn something new
• Beautiful content that makes people fall in “like”, stunning and thumb-stopping visual content
• Inspiring content that inspire through storytelling
• What else? Hint: Any content that makes your audience care, share, become aware, act, and convert.

#5 Amplify Your Content Distribution

Once content planning and production, and engagement on social media channels are over, it’s time to take “amplification” seriously.

1. Paid Social Advertising Strategy – Use paid social ads to reach people— mandatory in a pay-to-play world. Estimate a minimum monthly budget for paid social media.
2. Influencer and Earned Media Strategy – Earned media helps your brand message and content go beyond your own community.

#6 Plan Your Execution

With a solid plan in place, it’s time to delegate your people into executing the plan— a strategic planner, community manager, content creator, ad buyer, analyst and other talents. For efficiency, define your social media tasks on a daily, monthly, quarterly and yearly basis and evaluate performance.

Whether we like it or not, social media is a proven tool (or platform) for taking business relationships to the next level. These up-to-date social media strategies by Tinker Society are guaranteed to help you improve your social media branding. After all, that’s what we pray for—that your brand continues to prosper with every big goal.