Social Media Strategy for Businesses in 2020

Social Media is a vastly important aspect of a business’s online marketing strategy. It is continuously evolving, hence your strategy needs to be reviewed to ensure that you are utilising the platforms to the best possible advantage. Here’s the 2020 outlook on strategies and trends, as well as how to implement them for your business.

The 2020 Social Media strategy for businesses

The truth is, there is no sample template to follow - each business needs to have a tailored plan. Your strategy will include decisions on how your business will manage your social media channels and the kind of online presence you want your business to have. This will include the kind of content you share, the way you manage and communicate with your audience, your plans on advertising and the overall methods you engage with to drive engagement and sales.

With that in mind, these are the 3 overriding key ideals to note:

• Emphasise your unique selling point (USP): It is as important as ever to clearly communicate what makes your business distinctive. This is what will make you stand out and build loyalty with your audience. With so many options and algorithms impacting brand visibility, bringing a sense of creativity to your strategy is key in correctly communicating what makes you special and more importantly, worthy of the time and investment by your audience.
• Be content-wise: Consider the kind of content you supply to a given audience on a platform carefully. This will ensure your business remains relevant in the given context and offers value, rather than being seen as a hindrance. You’ll need to tailor your content to fit the platform and execute it well - consider both the visuals and the wordiness.
• Transparency: Be clear and firm in your business’s affiliations. This is what builds trust and community. The key is to have a specific voice and belief as an organisation - don’t be afraid to get involved in relevant conversations in a way that will ultimately resonate with your audience. With the worldwide Covid-19 pandemic happening in 2020, for example, be cognisant of the health precautions your business needs to adhere to and communicate these with your audience.

The trends to keep in mind

• Focus on traffic and engagement from qualified and relevant audiences, not vanity likes by following in the footsteps of Instagram, who have rolled out the removal of, and subsequently reduced, the importance of the number of post likes. Focus instead on real time engagement by commenting, interacting with and earning testimonials. In line with this, Instagram will be putting more emphasis on ‘call to action’ buttons, challenges and quizzes and an overall focus on Instagram Stories.
• Build a community by finding your audiences on specific platforms that allow this. Facebook Groups is set to be the future of Facebook, so include those in your plans for the platform.  If you have the opportunity to 'own' your groups. this may prove to be a valuable, cost-effective communication asset for your business.
• Augmented reality continues to grow, especially on TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram. This provides a great opportunity for users to ‘test’ products when shopping online, or to participate in remote or virtual events.
• Responsive search ads continue to outperform standard internet search ads thanks to AI (artificial intelligence) and machine learning.  This will change your strategy when it comes to advertising on platforms such as Google, Facebook and Amazon. These allow for wordier texts of more in depth descriptions that are optimized and viewed when people perform relevant searches.
• Video content continues to dominate and is predicted to do so in the future as well. This applies to both live content and pre-filmed and edited content with longer lifespans. This will hold the attention of your audience far better than images do, so 2020 is definitely the year to jump on this bandwagon if you haven’t yet.

How to implement your Social Media strategy

Your strategy should be able to cover plans on a quarterly, monthly, weekly and daily basis. The strategy needs to include your planning and publishing schedule, as well as the budgets, social media channels and content pillars. Commit to having content that has value, aspiration, uniqueness and a living lifecycle. This is what will spark shareable content and conversions.

Ultimately, the strategy explains the frequency (of posting and traffic generation), ability to generating leads (as well as increasing your reach and following), engaging and nurturing those leads and finally the customer (acquisition, retention and support).

With this in mind, ensure you have covered your bases in terms of:

• Setting goals (be clear and measurable)
• Establish audiences (both current and aspirational)
• Select platforms (only be present where appropriate)
• Design content (of high quality)
• Publishing content (consistently)
• Data insights and analytics (measurable information that you can base future decisions and strategies on, as well as measuring your efforts in terms of your ROI)

In 2020, in order to carry out your social media strategy, you need skilled personnel to implement the necessary tasks. Keep in mind the following roles and responsibilities:

• Planner
• Community Manager
• Content Creators
• Copywriter
• Ad buyer
• Analyst

Being at the forefront of the trends for 2020, your social media strategy can be aligned with the best social media practices, resulting in strengthened customer relations. Having a strategy that is specific to your needs paired with proper planning and execution, your social media marketing can be highly beneficial to your business.

Nexa has a full range of social media solutions for your business.  Contact us by completing the form on this page.