Your social media strategy for 2016

232.9 million out of 627.7 million Southeast Asians are active social media users. Since March 2015, this figure has grown by 23.9 million, a whopping 11% growth fuelled by a steady increase of high-speed internet connections and mobile users in growing economies. If your startup still isn’t reaching out to your customers via social media, the ship is definitely leaving without you.

As we come to the end of the year, it is a good time to refocus your marketing efforts and prepare to fire on all cylinders come new year. Undoubtedly, as people in Southeast Asia get on board social media by the millions, it might be wise for you to review what you’re doing and what you haven’t done to reach your next customer.

If you don’t know where to start, here are some tips of what you should start doing and what you should avoid in 2016.

What you should do

Try paid advertising

If all you’ve done on social media is posting sporadic blog posts on Facebook and couple of tweets on Twitter, you should consider getting serious and set aside a small budget for paid advertising. Facebook, like all mainstream social media channels like Twitter and LinkedIn, is constantly optimising their paid distribution algorithms. If you want to reach new users faster, parting with some cash for your content might not be a bad idea at all.

If Facebook is your main social media marketing channel, here’s another reason to try this strategy: Facebook could be restricting your organic reach. That being said, stop focusing about creating “viral” content and spend adequate time and effort producing quality content.

Try something new

What’s stopping you? You don’t need a digital movie camera and expensive software to produce short videos. You don’t need a condenser microphone and a studio to create podcasts. You certainly don’t need to hire full-time designers to come out with infographics. Take this as a challenge: Brainstorm for new forms of content that could potentially work for your brand. Find ways to do it at more affordable rates (look for affordable software or freelancers you can work with) and do it consistently. Measure the results through social media analytics or solicit feedback directly from your customers if they are enjoying the new content. If they don’t, try something new. If they do, congratulations! You just improved your repertoire of social media content that works for you.

Start keeping track of your social media efforts

Personally, I have two spreadsheets that help me understand the ROI of my social media efforts: one for sales and another for organic engagements. As I encourage you to do the same, allow me to run through how these spreadsheets help me in my work.

All marketing efforts should lead to return on investment in terms of sales, awareness or relationship management. While you can’t quantify awareness and relationships, you can certainly keep tabs on your sales. Like all other marketing efforts, it’s a good practice to create a system to track your expenses on social media and how it translates to any change in sales. In other words, by tracking, you will begin to understand how social media can boost your sales, and to what extent. For my first spreadsheet, I log down every single cent spent from my marketing budget and my formula will help me track the monetary ROI of my campaigns.

On my second spreadsheet is where I log down the organic engagements on a weekly basis. This spreadsheet not only makes my regular social media reports a breeze to generate, the data  gives me a micro view of the recent content trends and readership patterns. With that, I am better equipped with information of how I can optimise my postings.

If your startup’s marketing strategy relies heavily on social media, I encourage you to start creating a basic tracking system, as this will help you as you scale up your operations.

What you should avoid doing

Final thoughts