Roles of Social Media Strategist and Specialist When Building Up Website Traffic
After launching a new blog or website, whether you are simply trying to get visibility/exposure or selling a physical product or a digital product, you will first look for methods to let you promote your product or website. Especially when the methods that you won’t have to pay for i.e. Free traffic sources. After you have tried and exhausted the “free” methods, you will then start to use one or two paid advertising channels. In your internet marketing plan, you aim for low budget spending i.e. Even though you don’t really spend on advertising, you will still have to create the materials for promotion, and pushing your content materials out there on the internet. You would most probably create a plan to build up the necessary content about your product over time, and publish your content regularly on your few selected channels. Your first goal is to drive people to your website so they can view your product (whether they would later buy from you or not).
You will need the social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, etc as your channels/sources for posting your designed and written content and search for facebook, instagram and twitter branding tips. In the setup, you will need a social media strategist and/or specialist person. On the strategic side, the social media guy should identify which types of users on each social media your business would target. One of the common tactics is that she may roll out special deals on a product to lure people to like your Facebook fan/business page. Other times, she may develop a promotion contests in which people are expected to submit their own stories or reviews of a product in exchange of a prize. The execution part of the promotions would be performed by the social media specialist role. Overall, the social media strategist in this role is to get people (i.e. mostly end consumers) to talk about your business or product. When they talk, the context will eventually get passed to their families or friends, etc.
In some cases, your social media strategist and social media specialist may be two separate persons. When you are working on a low budget, she may simply be only one person but would be responsible for both roles. When you have made no provision on spending any budget on the role, you will have to take over and handle this role yourself. But you must determine which setup works best for growing your business in long term.
One other aspect to know is social media platforms such as Facebook makes use of behavioral targeting. Behavioral targeting would focus on each individual user. It has algorithms to analyze user responses based on demographics and other attributes. This allows the free social posts to be targeted to the right audience (or individual). The paid posts are simply a much larger scale to the free posts.
