If you or your company is looking to dominate the social media world, you must know how to develop a social media strategy. To do that grow your brand’s online reputation, generate communities and engage with your consumers you should consider being prepared and having an educated team to meet the challenge.

We have already spent on the stage of convincing companies to enter social networks. Now they have a conscience and many of them are online. Their lack of preparation to carry out social media strategies that contribute to the objectives is increasingly real evident of the brand.

Social networking sites are platforms designed to create Social Media, understood as the interaction that occurs between individuals within social platforms.

Social Media is digital interaction, and achieving such interaction requires knowledge, strategy, tactics and objectives.

How to be a master of Social Media Strategy

Not all companies have a budget to hire agencies, consultants or freelances to take care of it or guide them, but at least it is essential that they TRAIN, prepare their staff before wasting time, budget and resources.

Therefore, I want to share a list of the 8 areas or topics that you or your staff should know, understand and train before tackling a social media strategy. If you are already in it, the minimum knowledge you need to be able to greatly enhance your current work.

1. Objectives of the Company

No doubt it sounds obvious, but most companies do not take the time to make clear their goals in social networks and this is the main problem when waiting for results. “If you do not know where you’re going, you will not get anywhere.”

2. Online environment

One of the first things you must learn is how you work in the online world, how simple it is, how the internet is used, its browsers, tools, security, applications, bookmarks, etc.

3. The Consumer of today

Knowing the decision-making process of today’s consumer is essential to understand their dynamic search of information, comparison of products and their search for references before acquiring anything. If your company understands this dynamic in its own target it is more likely that it can generate successful social media strategies.

4. Online Research

One of the main tasks of a social media strategist or a community manager is to find information and search the internet to stay updated, so it is important to know how to manage your own search for information on the internet, with the help of tools such as Google Alerts, Feedly, RSS, IFTTT, Pocket or other similar platforms.

5. Content Strategy

The next thing to dominate is the best way to create contents that achieve results for your company in social networks, which are the ideals to generate social media (digital interaction). Here you must learn from how a content strategy is generated up to the different online tools that you have at your disposal to facilitate your task, such as Canva for design, Buffer for content promotion, Bitly for shortening links, Mailchimp for sending email marketing campaigns, among others.

6. Social networks

Of course, you should know how social networks work and how they are used, each one has different rules and its game or dynamics is different. It is essential that you know how they are handled, and the only way to do it is to use them first personally, then for your brand.

7. Management of Social Networks

You must prepare yourself for the work involved in managing social networks, so knowing how to program information, monitor and publish them is an important knowledge to acquire. It will also help you to master platforms such as Hootsuite, which serves to manage more than one account and different social networks from the same place, and at the same time work in a team with other collaborators of the brand.

8. Online Analysis

Knowing how to take advantage of the analytics of each social network is essential to measure your average social work, so it is important that you learn what they measure and what it means for your publications, brand objectives or what they tell you about your audience.