A 2022 Checklist For Social Media Marketing

Social media is one of the most powerful forms of marketing available today. It can make a big difference to your business prospects, no matter what the size of the enterprise or what sector you’re operating in. If you’re just getting started with social media marketing – or you’re keen to do more with the resources you have now, here’s our checklist for making it work for you in 2022.

• Plan a social media strategy. This should include your goals for social media marketing, the metrics you’re going to use to track your progress, as well as the channels you’re going to focus on and the type of content that you want to generate. You can start this process with an audit of how your business already uses social media, where it could do better and what already works. Make sure you pick the right social media platform for your target audience e.g. LinkedIn is best for B2B content and YouTube for longer form videos.
• Create a content calendar. This is basically a calendar for posting content that is aligned with your marketing goals and will speak to the audience you’re trying to reach. You can plan your posts weeks or months in advance, taking into account important dates or events that you want to focus on with each one. Don’t forget to research the best time to post content (each platform has its own analytics to help with this) and find the right system for scheduling content in advance if that’s what will work for you (platforms like Twitter already support this).
• Factor in social media advertising. Paid social will give you opportunities to better reach your target audience and promote your goods and services. You can be much more specific when it comes to targeting and achieve a far broader reach than is often possible by straightforward posting. You’ll need a strategy for working with social media advertising – start by establishing your goals and KPIs and then create a funnel that works with your chosen platform’s ad formats and objectives. You’ll then need to define the target audiences for your ads – use your own data (e.g. your customer lists) or the native data in the app (e.g. engagement stats) to help you do this.
• Track your analytics so that you can see what’s working and what isn’t. Social media analytics will give you a clear insight into the campaigns that are producing results and where you need to make improvements to get more from your social media marketing. You can use the analytics available internally via most apps or opt for third party providers. When you’re reviewing organic analytics, look at audience growth, reach and engagement. If it’s paid ads analytics, tracking Impressions will show you whether your ads are effective and cost per thousand impressions (CPM) will give you data with which you can set future cost benchmarks.

Social media marketing matters in 2022 and these are some of the key ways that you can start to leverage all the resources available.