Organizing and implementing a Social Media strategy is a complicated and very demanding task, at least in the beginning. As with other online actions, the process varies depending on the site's profile, but the basic idea is the same.

The idea for this article came from a client who did not understand that nothing online is safe and guaranteed, and that achieving results requires a lot of work and time. Time is the main obstacle we all face when it comes to results and tangible outcomes.

A well-developed Social Media strategy can bring many advantages to a site or blog, such as awareness, recognition, branding, customer satisfaction (and retention), and last but not least, traffic to the site. If the first are somewhat technical and will be addressed on another occasion, the site traffic is what interests us at this moment and this will be our goal today.

To start a marketing or social media strategy, a few steps must be followed.

Step 1. Know your customers.

Whether we are talking about a company's presentation site, an online store, or a blog, those we address can be classified as customers or potential customers, so we will call them that from now on. Knowing them, the personal profile of those interested in us and our products/services, their location, financial and professional situation, lifestyle and purchasing habits, everything is relevant.

No matter what type of site we represent, we will never address everyone. And precisely knowing the limits helps us better target our message and the channels through which we can better transmit it. For example, if we are a company that produces children's items, the task may seem simpler: we address parents. But are we limited to that? We also address future parents, grandparents, aunts, godparents, uncles, relatives, or family friends of the children's parents. Suddenly, our target audience has expanded. It is no longer just those between 25 and 35 years old, but also those under 25 and over 35, up to the age of grandparents.

The connection between the target audience and social media is close. Depending on their characteristics, gender, age, and habits are different and therefore they behave differently online. We must thus know where we can find these people, which social networks they use, what they do on them, how active they are, how often they log in, how long they stay, etc.

To find out as many details about them as possible, we can use data we have already collected without realizing it. Thus, from Google Analytics, data such as age, gender, location, interests can be highlighted, very important information about those who have visited the site. From the Facebook page, demographic and interest information can be extracted. A very good source can also be Alexa, where you can enter either your own site's link or a competitor's site. The larger the site and the more traffic it has, the more accurate the data displayed by Alexa is.

Read also How to find a niche audience for your site

Step 2. Identify the best channels to reach them

Once this information is gathered, we can more easily figure out where we can find more people who fit that profile. For example, if our audience consists of people over 45 years old, then we can exclude some social networks. Twitter is a network where, at least in our country, people over this age represent a very small share, so it is not advisable to allocate too much importance or resources to this channel. I am not saying to ignore it, but it is better to focus on others.

Another thing to consider here is that if the company itself addresses the B2B sector, then the social media strategy must be significantly adapted.

The use of social networks in our country differs greatly from the pattern in other countries, so studies conducted abroad should not be taken into account, where certain sites that have not yet penetrated here are included and which there occupy part of Facebook's market share, for example.

What exactly we should publish on these channels, how often they should be used, and how long everything takes will be discussed in the next article!