Social Media Best Practice - The 7 C’s of Social
By: Sam Horsley | Social Media Lead
2023 is the year to build your social media strategy to build community and loyalty.
We’ve used the 7 C’s of social to approach our social media best practices and strategy for brands. There’s a lot that comes with posting on social media and is not just about creating amazing content but to share content that will get your community active. And, in most cases, have a return on your investment for your brand.
Before we begin, think about your brand and its goals. Whilst reading, you’ll slowly bring parts of your social strategy to life.
Community
We already know your community and audience is a priority on your social media channels this year.
So, how do you determine who your audience is?
Ask yourself these questions:
· What social media channels do they use?
· Why do they use these channels?
· How do they engage?
· What are they talking about?
You might find out that your audience are 18-24 year olds and they love watching reels on Instagram. Or you audience are women ages 45+ on Pinterest who love to shop online.
Knowing all this, you can start to build your strategy around your audience type. Being able to feed them the right content on the right platforms at the right time.
Context
Next is deciding what content your audience wants to see. There are a few things to consider when choosing you content.
What part of the funnel are you creating content for?
· FAME, your brand awareness. Content will likely be to educate and highlight your brand.
· FINDABILITY. Content to engage and get people liking, clicking and more.
· FULFILLED, your ROI. What content will get people to your website or even purchase your product?
Is your brand going to educate, inspire or sell?
Curation
Sometimes creating content is using other’s content and message and sharing it back out with a purpose and meaning.
In the simplest way, curation is a great way to use UGC and even repurposing your own content. Driving the message of your brand with the trust and conversation from others.
Creation
Now the fun of creating the content begins. I’m sure our Creative Team have the most fun job at Bottle.
So how do you bring what you now know to life?
It’s time to decide how you showcase your content, is it in short video form? A blog post? A snazzy infographic?
TOP TIP: Create a content calendar to keep on track of what and when you’re posting.
Emplifi is one of our tools we use to streamline our social media planning.
Connection
Time to get physical. This C is all about connecting with your audience and sharing your content.
Get your nose stuck into the data and find out what your community wants to share and engage with.
Earlier we looked at your community on who they are but now we want to know what content they really get involved in and do more than just look at your content.
Dive into previous content or content from competitors to see what has the highest engagement rates and shared content.
Conversation
We have spoken a lot about community, but it is so important that we engage back with our audience.
Don’t let your audience feel like they’ve wasted their time commenting. Community management is so important to keep the conversations going. You’ve put in all the hard work to get it started so let’s keep the ball rolling.
Conversion
We’ve now gone full circle and are thinking back to our business goals. What are we converting our social media community too.
Is your final step of the funnel to generate leads to your sales team can get on the phones?
Are you wanting to increase your website traffic?
Or are you looking for that all important sale on your e-commerce website?
With your business strategy in mind, create KPI’s that can be achieved in your social media strategy for ROI.
HOT TOP TIPS
· Create content that fits to the right size of each platform
· Content calendars to keep you organised
· Do you research, audits and analyse your audience
· Find out the best time to post on each platform
· Where can you implement a paid strategy?
· Quality content over quantity.
Awareness, engagement and sales… but most importantly loyalty. Keep your community with you, from campaign to campaign. They will grow and build trust with your community.
We’ve only just started to scratch the surface of our social strategy with our social media best practice. Want to know more about our social media services? Head to our services and see how we can build you the ultimate social strategy.
