Staying the Course on Your Social Media Strategy

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If you’re reading this, odds are you’re considering getting help with your social media strategy. Whether it needs beefing up, a few minor tweaks, or a total revamp–for whatever reason, you’re just not seeing the results you hoped for.

We could ask a million questions to better understand what went wrong. The first one? How long have you been following your roadmap?

How long have you been testing your current social media strategy?

We get it – we exist in a society that demands instant gratification. Results from your social media strategy are no different. We wish results were instantaneous – spoiler alert, that’s not how it works.

What does staying the course look like?

Once the development phase of your social media strategy is complete – setting a budget, determining KPIs, analyzing your audience, etc. – and you begin putting it into action, the work is only just beginning.

We’ve seen it all regarding companies and organizations staying the course (or not) with their strategies.

Some clients have wanted to change everything and head back to the drawing board after just a few weeks of deployment – leading to a lack of brand recognizability, disorganization, and (not to sound dramatic) chaos. Engagements like this usually end up disappointing everyone.

In more positive examples, we’ve seen remarkable success when a client collaborates with us in creating the strategy and trusts us to work our magic over time. In these cases, we can work within our strategy, maintain the client’s trust and confidence that we’ll get there, and exceed expectations.

Does that mean we can’t pivot from the social media strategy at all?

The short answer is no. No strategy is perfect from the get-go. We test and learn and test and learn and test and learn. We let the numbers do the talking, and we adjust based on what they tell us.

But there’s a big difference between making minor tweaks – like adding more frequent testimonials to our content mix or changing some of our hashtags – and completely redeveloping a new strategy and brand look. That’s where the trouble starts.

When we don’t give our carefully constructed social media strategy the time and space it needs to breathe and achieve, we confuse the audience and lose their interest. Because if we can’t figure out who we are as a brand, how can we expect them to trust us?

Give your social media strategy the time it deserves

Putting together a social media strategy is no small feat, and there is a method to the madness. It takes lots of time, money, energy, research, and manpower to assemble something everyone feels comfortable and confident in. Why waste those resources by giving up early?

Realistically, a social media strategy could take months or upwards of a year to earn the desired results. Like all else, good things take time. Building a following won’t happen overnight if your brand isn’t active and effective on social media before deploying the strategy. And then once the following exists, building brand loyalty and recognizability takes time, too. Track your metrics to know what’s catching on and what’s not.

How Can We Help?

We can assure you if your strategy is strong and there’s an appropriate effort going toward deployment, it will get you to where you want to go. We can help.