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A social media marketing strategy will help your business define goals with actionable tasks in order to establish a consistent presence, engage your target audience and optimize long-term results. Here is a breakdown of the essential elements of an effective social media strategy, suggestions for implementation and points to consider:  

Establish an actionable goal. Set goals that address your biggest marketing challenge and develop content accordingly. Increasing brand awareness is one example of a realistic and actionable goal for social media. Crafting content that is authentic and personable will act as more of a soft-sell to attract prospects that can relate to and respond to your message.

Measure your audience. Instagram users are primarily under the age of 30, which would call for bold, captivating content and imagery, while LinkedIn would provide an audience for more scholarly, industry-specific content. Take advantage of the tools available to view detailed audience demographics for each channel, as well as your audience in particular, in order to make informed decisions about your message and make appropriate adjustments. 

Build relationships. Measure the right metrics to develop meaningful engagement and sales. With ever-changing social media algorithms, tracking reach for your posts is a key metric. Other important metrics include user clicks, engagement and hashtags. Who is responding to your content and how? Who interacted with your content as a percentage of who was reached? What hashtags created the most engagement? Knowing the answers to these important questions will help you craft a message that consistently engages with your target audience. (Developing content without real time audience and engagement insight is simply just creating content and hoping it will be effective.)

Evaluate the competition. An informed social media strategy will be aware of how the industry competition is using social media, what is working for them and why. Developing and adapting your own campaign around this information will help make it more successful. Advanced tools are available to help you measure and identify competitor performance, but the key is to identify industry rivals and see how the socially active are engaging your target audience. 

Craft social content. In general, users prefer authentic content. Sift through, share and repost user-generated content from branded hashtags to keep posts fresh, relevant and always available. Theme your posts as a way to develop and motivate content. 

Engage your audience. Timely responses are expected on social channels. Gain respect for your company and brand by being present. Take advantage of engagement opportunities and make regular communication through social media a priority. 

Develop an effective social media marketing strategy by setting long-term actionable goals that can be measured over time. Evaluate audience metrics, encourage engagement and foster meaningful conversations to gain respect for your brand and company. Consistently evaluate what's working, what isn’t and how you can make improvements along the way.