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Social Media Strategy in Kenya - Digital Marketing in Nairobi, Kenya
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Social Media Strategy in Kenya

Social Media Strategy in Kenya

Social media strategies are only successful if the content that is created is shared amongst the users on the platform. The content, videos, posts, and images. Should be “sticky” in that it encourages users to either share the content within their communities or convert. Conversion is any desired action by the marketing campaign.

Most social networks changed their algorithms and encourage sticky content that is shareable. Even if they are paid campaigns. If one or two users like a “post” then the post is further shared to more people. If the other people like the same post it is further spread to more people.

The benefit of shared content is that it carries an implicit endorsement from people who are trusted. Here are some tips to create a social media strategy that will create sticky content:

1.     Goals

Any social media strategy begins with a goal. There must be something that the business wants to achieve at the end of a set period. The major goals that social media can help attain are

  • Increasing brand awareness
  • Generating leads
  • Getting sales
  • Growing the business’ audience
  • Increasing web traffic
  • Increasing community engagement

The goals should be S.M.A.R.T. goals. These are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Timebound.

If the business is planning to use different social networks, then each network can be used to target a different goal. For example, the size of Facebook can be used to get sales and leads while twitter can be used to increase brand awareness.

When tracking these goals, digital marketers should avoid vanity metrics like “likes”, and number of followers but they should look at things like engagement, click through rates and conversion rates. These helps make better actionable decisions.

2.     Audience Research

Social media platforms provide a wealth of information about the people who are on them. For example, on Facebook you can find out this information:

  • Age
  • Location
  • average income
  • Typical job title or industry
  • Interests

For the social media strategy to be successful, it will have to address the buyer personas and the audiences to meet their needs. If the audience is properly defined, then content can be created that will pique their interests. This will lead to the content being easily shared, engaged and more conversions.

The buyer personas and audience definitions can be easily gotten by interviewing current fans or followers to see why they joined the community and what they would like to see in the future.

3.     Knowing which social network to use

Almost a century ago, there was a bank robber named John Dillinger. He was asked a simple question: why do you rob banks? His answer: that is where the money is.

Using john Dillinger’s logic, when choosing a social network to use, the digital marketer would choose one where his clients are.

Facebook is sometimes misleading having the biggest user base but at the same time its not the best platform for everything. For example, if fashion items are being sold to millennials and Gen Zs the best platform to use is Instagram. This is because the millennial audience is bigger over there and they respond favorably to images, videos, and stories.

There is no right or wrong social network to use but there is one that would lead to more conversion that the others.

4.     Quality content

User attention right now is more valuable than any stock on any market. Social media giants like Facebook and YouTube try to do everything to ensure that they can keep user attention. It is so important to them that they have changed their algorithms so often to maximize user attention.

As these two do not have their own content they rely on content creators. They will try and find engaging content to push to their users. When a post or video gets traction, they push it to the wider community hoping to get more of the attention.

There is a lot of content out there as we speak but none of it is worth being viral. As a digital marketer it is your job to create quality content that the social media networks will push on your behalf. To ensure that your content is better than most people you would need to see what your competition is doing. Not to copy them but to improve on how well you can tell your story.

Content themes

It is difficult to come up with good content on the regular. Even if you have great content creators, at some point they will be burnt out. One way of engaging the creatives is to come up with content themes. Like the name says content themes, creates content from themes. Various themes could include videos, photos, inspirational posts, education posts and entertaining posts.

User generated content

User generated content is content created by the fans or followers in your community. This involves using the content they have come with, with their consent, to push your marketing message. You can do this by asking them to use hashtags tagging your business or activity they are doing.

The user content is authentic and helps to push the marketing message.

Time sensitive content

Social media platforms like Snapchats realized they can make the most of fear of missing out (FOMO). They do this by having content only available for a short while then it is deleted forever. This became so popular that Instagram and Facebook have adopted it into their systems. They have new names like Instagram stories.

The benefit of these short clips is that they keep the content fresh and keeps people glued to their devices because they do not want to miss out on anything. As a marketer, it would be wise to tap on these contents to keep your audience always engaged.

Video Rules

YouTube and mobile devices have ruled this revolution. Many people would prefer to learn by watching engaging videos rather than reading lengthy contents. Video has become so important that only recently that LinkedIn has introduced LinkedIn videos.

Brands should take advantage of this opportunity to make videos that provide value to their communities.

5.     Scheduling posts

Once you have come up with great content the next thing is to think about posting the content consistently. Businesses should figure out what time is the best time to post their content. Once the audience gets used to the posts coming out on a certain day and a particular time they will be looking out for the new information.

Scheduling posts way early in advances frees up time to do other things like see how well the content is doing, respond to various queries and comments and adequately plan for the next posts.

There are many paid options for scheduling posts but a simple excel or google docs sheet would go a long way to help with this. This would be your social media content calendar.

Having a posting schedule give you the opportunity to carefully plan the kind of content you will have going up in the week or month.

Content can be divided into the following:

  • 50% for driving traffic
  • 20% to drive conversions (newsletter, sign ups, eBooks and downloads)
  • 25% from other curated sources
  • 5% will be about company culture.

6.     Tracking results

Tracking metrics are important to see what is and isn’t working. Through the data we can make decisions that will help improve the performance of the social media campaigns. Tracking this information is so important that all major social media platforms have their own ways to doing it. There is Facebook and twitter analytics.

In addition, you would also want to track the people who come to your site through Google analytics. Not all the metrics are important but here are some that should be kept on the fore ground:

  • Reach: this refers to the number of users who get to see your post.
  • Clicks: the number of people who clicked on any of your content, logo or company name. the clicks are important because they tell you the number of people who clicked which part of the post and gives you an idea how any people have moved down the marketing funnel.
  • Impressions: this the number of times your post could have been seen by your audience.
  • Engagement: this is the number of people who interacted with your posts divided by the number of impressions. The engagement includes clicks, likes, comments, shares, replies and messages on any of the posts. A high engagement ratio means that the post was a good one.
  • Hashtags or tags: these are keywords that have been added the pound symbol – #. This measures how many people are interacting the message you are pushing. Its mostly associated with twitter.
  • Mentions: this is the number of times one of the people in your audience has mentioned you in any posts
  • Shares: this is when your audience takes your content and shares it with their community

7.     Researching your competition

Unless you are selling something incredibly unique or niche specific there is an exceptionally good chance that you are competing against other companies. And after you are successful in selling your unique product you are bound to face some competition.

Luckily through social media you can spy on your competition. This does not involve copying what they are doing but by looking at how they are achieving success. Followed by coming up with your own strategy that would bring better results. There will not be a need to reinvent the wheel.

Looking at your competition you will find that they have invested heavily on one channel and from there you can pick the channels they are not on. Once you corner this side of the market it would take them a while to catch up to you.

Social listening is an option for you to look at what your competitors are doing. You would research, their names, industry, and keywords. This should show you what they are sharing and what people in general are saying about them.

 

8.     Timely responses

Many people expect companies to respond to their inquiries as soon as possible. Gone are the days where the customer would wait on the line to get to speak to a customer service representative. Knowing that they will be put on hold or asked to talk to a machine.

These days people know the best way to get a company’s attention is to tag them in any one of their social platforms and they will respond. This is more of social customer care. Quick and timely responses leave customers with a good feeling and they end up trusting the company they work with.

9.     Social media audit

Social media audits can be done at the beginning of the year or after a period of three to six months. This would be to assess if the goals that were targeted have been reached and if they haven’t how much has the marked been reached.

These are the kind of questions that would need to be answered:

  • What is or is not working?
  • Who is engaging with our content?
  • Is our target audience in this platform?
  • How well are we doing as opposed to our competition?

After looking at the audit, better decisions can be made to improve the general performance.

When a page or social media profile becomes increasingly successful, people out there create imposter accounts to build their own following. There have been several cases where one increasingly successful content creator has been badly copied. This ends up diluting the power of the brand and is harmful to it.

 

Social media Networks

1. Facebook

As of this writing Facebook is the biggest social network with a quarter of the earth’s population being on it. The social media platform takes its users seriously by providing a host options in which they can post their content. Content can be in the form of posts, videos, pictures, and gifs. Facebook discourages users to leave its platform and wants people to post as much as they can on it.

 Facebook has been around for so long that people do not have to learn to use the product. They naturally revolve around it. Also, Facebook is very protective of their number one position that they acquire any other social network that is growing. Instagram and whatsapp were bought as soon as they started having large number of users.

Facebook advertising

Of all the social networks, none can rival fakebook’s targeting options. You can target people according to demographics, interests, behavior, past activity and many more. When it comes to lead generation, it has the lowest cost per lead at roughly $1.

The Cost per click or the cost per mille prices vary depending on how broad or narrow the targeting is. As a rule, Facebook’s algorithms work more efficiently when more money is spent over a period.

2. Instagram

Instagram, owned by Facebook, is in an incredibly unique position. It does not have the most active users, but it has something that other social networks done have – engagement. Instagram has the highest engagement rate of all social media platforms. The engagement rate on Instagram are 58% than that of Facebook and 2000% more than twitter.

Instagram’s audience is also unique in that it is mostly female, and the age ranges are between 18 to 29 years.

Instagram initially started as a social network for posting photos, but they have pivoted to having videos as well. They have even gone further to let users host events on Instagram.

As the content is highly visual, any product that depends on this feature does well on the platform. Posts that do well on Instagram are:

  • Inspirational quotes
  • Questions that engage followers
  • Luxury brand photos

Influence marketer

Influence marketing is biggest on Instagram with many celebrities having profiles over there. It is easier to have an influencer status on Instagram because of the visual component.

3. Twitter

Twitter is the more unique social media channel in that you do not have to know your followers or have a prior connection. It boasts having 0.3 billion monthly active users.

Twitter was a small social network and what brought it out to the fore front was people were able to talk about breaking news. As such it changed the way people get breaking news. In the recent past, there was an attack in France and most of the news that was available was gotten from the social media site.

Twitter has a unique audience in that users are 6.9 times more likely to buy online. The audience is more mature and tend to have better conversations.

Twitter is mostly used for brand awareness, promotion of certain products and lastly for directing conversations.

4. Pinterest

This social media site is visual based like Instagram but is more targeted to women. The user base consists 81% women.

It is especially useful as it has high engagement, and high intention to purchase.

5. LinkedIn

For B2B marketers, LinkedIn is the best way to go. the main audience is professionals who are aged 30 – 64 years, even split between men and women and earn $50,000 and above per year.

LinkedIn isn’t suitable for all industries but works well with marketing, recruiting and high end B2B products and services.

6. YouTube

YouTube has the most users in terms of social media platforms. Its traffic is only rivaled by Google itself. Many people these days prefer to look for items on YouTube as opposed to Google because it is easier to follow a video rather than reading an article.

It is best suited for long form content, this being videos that are 10 minutes more and above.

Social Media Benefits

Brand Awareness

The internet has made the world smaller, companies that are across the world are providing goods and services to our doorstep. As such there is a lot of pressure to compete locally and internationally. The only way to do this is if people know about the existence of your business.

Consumers buy goods and services from brands the recognize and trust. Here is where social media shines brightest. Social media can be used to get in front of people quickly and easily. Once the clients have engaged with the particular social media profiles a lot can be done.

The social media profiles can be used to find out the needs and wants of consumers without directly asking them. This can be done by seeing what they are talking about in relation to the company. By doing this you get to learn customers’ opinions and interests.

Social media is in part free and gives you the option of scaling your messages to a larger audience either through going viral or paying for viewership.

Through social media, brand awareness is driven up by various engagements. The engagements include comments, likes, retweets, shares, reposts and subscribing.

The social media content has to be visually engaging and be able to catch the attention of potential clients.

Tell Your Story

Whether a company sells directly to customers or to other businesses, they are still dealing with people. Through stories, the company is able to connect with customers on an emotional level increasing sales at the end of the day.

The stories can be about the brand, mission, values, how the company was founded and any other social mission they are involved with. These greatly improve a brand’s image.

Stories have a unique advantage of connecting with people on a personal level. This also lets people walk with the company through the triumphs and the lows. The stories will inspire action from your consumers to do something positive in their lives.

A good story will become viral and thus increasing the company’s reach.

Social Customer Service

50% of the population in the world rely on social media to air their grievances. They know when they try to get in touch with customer care they will have to interact with robots. Rather than calling the customer care numbers to ask for help, the customers know they can get quicker responses from either Facebook or Twitter.

The customers know that the companies have a huge following on these social media sites. They also know that the company doesn’t want any negative comments hanging on their page and they do everything they can to handle all disputes quickly.

As a company, you can invest in hiring social customer service who will be able to track every complaint and make sure that they are answered in a short while. In the case of criticisms of the company, the customer service can properly listen to the complaints and address the.

The positive benefit of doing this is it will lead to building meaningful relationships between the company and the customers. These relationships will lead to customer loyalty and repeat business. Another benefit of this is that social platforms have broken down barriers between companies and clients. This leads to better communication.

Customer Loyalty

Repeat customers are the lifeblood of any business. Customers become repeat customers when they are satisfied with the products or service. If they are happy they will connect with the company’s social media platforms.

Business can create a stronger bond with their customers by engaging with them on social media. Customers can talk to the businesses and find out how to solve any problem or any new product offering coming out soon. Through the social media forums, the clients can be rewarded by being given promo codes for discounts and exclusive offers.

Getting traffic to your website

As things stand the only people who get to your website are the ones who either have interacted with your business before, know you in the industry or used google to find you. This limits the potential of all the people out there who have never heard of you.

Through social media marketing, you can bridge the divide of getting to people who have never heard of your business. By consistently posting content with links to your site on various social media platform will bring referral traffic back to your site.

As soon as people see you as an authority on the social media site, they will naturally start following you and will be curious about your business and go to your website. The added benefit is that these people will become brand ambassadors and share your content to their networks. Thus increasing your coverage.

The best part about this kind of referral traffic is that they stay on the site longer, visit more pages and can provide necessary feedback on how to improve site navigation. The more traffic you get on your website will involuntarily increase your page ranking on search engines.

There is also an added benefit of link building. When people see that the content your posting is helpful, they might link to your site or blog post. This will increase your website’s authority and help your search rankings.

Social Media Marketing is almost free

Opening a social media account is free on many platforms. There are companies that open these accounts and post organic content for a long period of time. Through this investment they are able to build an audience and a following which would translate to business. The only requirements for this investment are time, creative and useful content and consistency.

It’s important to note that many social networks are discouraging organic growth. They do this by limiting the reach organic posts used to have in the past. Facebook is well known for this and for a business to grow they will have to pay to play.

In addition, many businesses don’t have the time to wait to build a name for themselves and would prefer to use paid options to get their messaging out there. In this scenario social media is still mostly free in the sense that the amount of investment that is required is very little as compared to other marketing channels.

Become an Authority

This is one of my main reasons to be involved in social media – becoming a brand authority in your niche. These days there is too much information as everyone is posting anything online. For a business to stand out from all the clutter, they will need to provide useful and original content consistently.

The more the businesses post these kinds of content on social media the more people will be inclined to trust them as a credible source of information. More importantly search engines will also regard the business as an authority on the subject.

Once customers see that they can trust your expertise then it would be easier to get their businesses. The company doesn’t have to compete on price any more with other businesses but on value. This also gives them the opportunity to raise their prices.

Many companies try to post for a period of time but they don’t see results so they stop. Although the ones that do it regularly without fail come to be seen as experts on the matter and finally get to see some results.

Retargeting

As we know very few customers buy something the first time they visit the site. They need to become more acquainted with the business so that they feel they can trust it and buy from them. The question is how do you get people to see your business after visiting it for the first time?

The answer is retargeting the users with ads. These remarketing ads will follow the user everywhere they go on the display network. Reminding the potential clients of your products or services.

The only way to do this on social media is through Facebook ads. There isn’t any other social network that has built this feature. Facebook lets you install Facebook pixels on a website so that you can follow users on Facebook and its other properties.

Increasing Conversions

Conversions are any action the business wants the customer to do. They could be signing up as a lead, buying a product or service, and lastly branding campaigns.

Social media can play a role increasing conversions for a business either on the website or on the social network. There are two ways that conversions can be achieved, either through paid or organic.

Paying for conversions is a much faster way of getting conversions. By leveraging the social media platform’s algorithms, they can help increase conversions by targeting the right audience.

Getting conversions organically involves a longer and more complex strategies.

Conversions naturally increase by increasing visibility and meeting the consumer wherever they are. The more the consumer becomes affiliated with your brands they are more likely to buy from you. This is because of familiarity and people like to do business with people they know.

Social media allows you to form positive opinions on people and easier to relate to them. Once businesses are seen sharing content, posting, commenting, and interacting with users, the consumer becomes more easily persuaded when it comes to asking for the sale.

Social media marketers claim that 6 to 7 hours spent a week on social media gives them a 51% more chance to convert users. The users trust the businesses because they have proven their credibility and their expertise. These people are more inclined to share and talk about the business positively to their friends increasing the sphere of influence.

Engaging with your audience

Social media gives a company the opportunity to engage with its customers. The engagement is through comments, likes posts and responding to any questions asked the by the consumers.

Consumers like being heard and feeling special. Through communication a business relationship can forged. This two-way communication will lead to more opportunities to get more conversions as it builds trust and helps the business to understand the customers’ needs.

The best way to know how to improve a product or service is by interviewing the end users. Its normally difficult to get the consumer to sit down and respond to a survey. The way around this is by doing it through social media, which lets you monitor what people are talking about the product or service.

Getting this information, you will get to see how to improve and better understand the industry you are in.

Competition Research

The pros and cons of social media is that you can find out what your competition is doing while at the same time they can do the same to you. Going through the social media of your direct and indirect competitors gives you a wealth of information.

You can learn to see what kind of content they post, and  how it is received. You can look at the number of comments, likes, retweets and dislikes. With this you can craft your own messages that answer all the questions and comments better.

In addition to learning about the competition, you can learn about how well educated the consumer is about the product or service. The level of interaction shows how informed about the industry. For example, if a consumer starts using technical jargon it shows that they are heavily invested as opposed to the one who isn’t.

Building Custom Audiences

Social media platforms help provide data to help you understand how your audience has been reacting to various posts. From the data you can find out how many people saw your content, if it was shared and if they clicked on any call to action and lastly if there are any conversions.

Through this you can create custom audience of people who are interested in certain kinds of posts, people who bought or who have not, and if you need to change the call to action. With the custom audiences each group gets a different message making it more personalized and moving them through the sales funnel.

For example, people who are ready to buy would get messages about discounts, promotions and sales that are ending soon. While at the same time people who are just interested in the products will be informed about product features and benefits.

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  1. November 24, 2023, 9:02 am

    […] discoverability, credibility, and affordable testing/optimization make it a crucial part of any modern marketing strategy. Leveraging the right tactics can deliver great ROI for […]

  2. November 29, 2023, 3:33 pm

    […] integrated approach is advised including social media campaigns, search engine optimization, personalized communications, and data-driven […]

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