Creating a social media strategy for your network marketing business is a critical step in building your audience and growing your business.

But with so many platforms filled with different voices, how do you develop a successful plan that puts you in a position to break through the noise and reach your audience?

This is where taking the time to do your research and knowing how to develop an effective strategy pays off. Let’s take a look at the steps to get you there.

Identify Your Goals & Objectives

Before you can begin deciding on what you are going to do, you need to first identify what you are trying to achieve. If you come up with an action plan without any goals, then you have nothing to measure your success against and will often be aimlessly jumping from one task to another.

Use the concept of SMART goals when defining your objectives. If your not familiar with the acronym, SMART goals are:

S: Specific
M: Measurable
A: Achievable
R: Relevant
T: Time based

Taking this approach ensures that you have a well defined objective. The success of your social media plan will be measured by your ability to meet this objective and every component of your plan should be aimed at meeting your goals.

Know Your Audience

If you’re an experienced network marketer, chances are you have a pretty good understanding of your target audience, but what if you are just getting started? Or what if you know who your audience is, but don’t have a great understanding of their online tendencies?

This is where defining your target audience comes into play. You need to understand not only who your audience is, but where they are spending their time online.

But how do you know what social media platforms they are using? To find the answer to this question, you can use data about your target audience to your advantage. For example, you can use things like age and gender coupled with social media data to make fact based decisions rather than relying on your own assumptions.

Develop Your Buyer Personas

Taking your target audience definition to the next level, you can develop buyer personas. Brands use buyer personas to narrow down where they are investing their marketing time and money. As a network marketer, you can use the same strategy.

Create a persona for the people who buy from you today. The more research you can do into accurately portraying your customers the better. Your persona should include a variety of demographic, psychographic, and behavioral factors.

If you plan to use influencer marketing as part of your social media strategy, you may want to include influencers as one of your buyer personas. They’re a target audience too!

Perform a Social Media Audit

Knowing what platforms your target audience is using is great, but before you set up your own social media channels, it’s good to get out there and see what other network marketers are doing and where they are seeing success. Start by selecting two to three distributor’s profiles that you admire and use them for inspiration.

You can look at what is working for them and compare the different types of content you see as well as what kind of engagement rate they are able to get. Then, you can leverage the same strategies that yielded the best response.

You should also study things like the frequency at which they post, what their audience size is, how many visuals they use, whether they use video or not, what their tone is, and how they reply to customer’s who are having a customer service issue.

Whether it’s defining your audience, knowing what platforms they are using or the most successful way to engage with your audience, you should always use existing data as an input to your decision making process. Again, this allows you to make fact based decisions instead of assumptions.

Create a Brand-Centric Social Media Strategy

Not only do you need personas for your customers, but you need a persona for your brand as well. You have to establish a voice and a sense of character for your brand.

Will your brand be serious, straight-laced, and lacking all emoji use? Will you establish a playful and coy tone for your brand? Whatever you select should match how you want to be perceived when you approach someone as a brand.

Choose the Right Time to Post

Timing is everything on social media. Don’t show up to the party late — instead look up tie-ins to holidays and seasons long in advance. Then, you can create custom posts for your products and services that blend in.

You also need to focus on both the time of day and what days of the week you post. There are certain times that more people are online than others.

Document Your Plan

While you don’t need to spell out the details of every post you’ll be publishing, you do need to document the key components of your plan. Take time to put together an executive summary that includes the following details:

• Objective(s)
• Target Audience
• Target Platforms
• Brand Personality
• Posting Strategies
• Implementation Schedule

Having a well documented plan with well defined objectives puts you in an excellent position for social media success!

Execute Your Social Media Plan

Now that you have a well defined plan, it’s time to put some wheels in motion. Use your implementation schedule as a guide to know what specific tasks you are doing and when you are doing them.

Understand that executing your plan takes time and requires patience. It is not something you will complete in a day, week or month, but rather a continuous process that requires ongoing effort and attention.

Measure Your Results and Make Changes

Expecting success on the first try is not the right mindset when executing your plan. You have to remain flexible in your approach and know that things will change over time.

Social media success is all about doing the analysis, optimizing your performance and duplicating results. Keep records of what you try, what the response was, and what you might do differently in the future. Once you find tactics that work, try to duplicate those results by using the same strategies.