My New Social Media Strategy
Iv’e decided to implement a form of the scientific method with my social media strategy. I love writing in my blog and I have seen an upward trend in visitors from month to month, but only a slight increase. I want to keep this upward trend going and going, but I also want to test new strategies so I can help others formulate one for themselves. This post can also serve as a learning piece for others; It’s okay to test new strategies.
The strategy
My goal is to write 6 posts every week and release a post between 12:30pm and 1:30pm EST Monday-Saturday. Today will be the exception of debuting a new post on Sunday, but Sundays going forward will be my “best of the week” day. I’ll republish once every hour from 11am-7pm EST my most popular posts during the week. I will start implementing my new strategy tomorrow.
The strategy that I was using before involved me scheduling my tweets throughout the day the night before. Instead of posting links to articles every hour, I’ll use Twitter to engage with others and post an article once a day at roughly the same time. This will also help me create relationships on Twitter, which will help me accomplish part of my goals listed below.
How am I going to test this strategy?
I use Google Analytics to measure site visits and I can easily compare month to month, day to day or even hour to hour. I haven’t written a detailed post on how to use Google Analytics, but leave a comment below if you would be interested in that. If I notice a higher percentage of change between the this month, last month and the coming month, I’ll know how well this strategy worked.
The Goal
Having social media goals will keep you on track and motiviate you. I’ll take this month to measure how many of the following occur, and use that to create a goal for each month going forward.
– Increase blog subscriptions
– Increase blog comments
– Increase engagement on Twitter
– Increase engagement on Facebook
– Book more speaking engagements
– Increase guest posts on the blog
– Increase guest blogging opportunities on other blogs
How to implement
Having a full time job in addition to managing the blog can be time consuming. My personal goal is to have blog posts written two days in advance and set them to publish automatically. I’ll write a post today (Sunday) that won’t get published until Wednesday because I already have articles that I wrote last week that need to be published. I also set it up so WordPress will tweet my article for that day automatically at the time I set.
I am really excited to experiment with this strategy and the metrics I have set are easy to measure. I’ll write a post a month from now on how I did. I’m hoping that this will also serve as an example for others on how to set social media goals. What do you think of this strategy and will you start your own? Let us know in the comments so others can learn from you too.
Image Source: MorrHighen; Stock.Xchng