How to: Social Media Strategy
First - let’s define a social media strategy.
Your strategy should help you make decisions, create content, and reach your audience. It outlines your specific, measurable, and attainable goals; sets a plan for tactics on how to reach those goals; and establishes metrics to measure success.
Posting daily is not a strategy.
Posting reels with trending audio is not a strategy.
Copying your competitors is not a strategy.
10 Steps
I’ve been a social media manager for 10 years. I’ve narrowed it down to these 10 steps to create a social strategy that will help you reach your goals.
Goals
Audience
Competition
Audit
Platforms
Inspiration
Plan
Create
Analyze
Learn
Create a document and write down each step, as this will act as your social strategy outline.
1. Goals
You’re looking to take your social media game to the next level. Why?
As a business, what goals do you have? And, how does that translate into social media? For instance, if you’re looking to help potential clients find you, your social media goal is to increase awareness. Goals should be specific, measurable, and attainable.
Now, choose how you are going to track progress towards the achievement of your goal! All social media platforms have internal analytics tools that you can use to track the metric of your choice. Using the example above, let’s track follows, shares, and views on reels!
2. Audience
Who is your audience? I hope as a business, you have this figured out. Now, it’s time to translate that to social media.
Using information you already have about your community, we can know what platforms they’re on, who they follow, and how you can help them!
3. Competition
Do NOT copy your competition.
No one is going to unfollow your competition to follow someone who posts the same exact content. You’re not going to steal loyal followers or clients.
But, you can learn what others are doing in the industry. And, where they’re falling short. That’s your space to thrive.
4. Audit
Here is where you learn what is working for you at the moment! What your followers and community are loving, what they want more of, and what they don’t connect with.
We also learn about your profile itself. Is your account bio explaining who you are and what you do? Is your profile picture recognizable? Is your bio leading the audience to somewhere that you can collect leads? Do your pinned posts capture the essence of your brand and introduce your company to new faces well?
These are all things we learn and get ready to change in a social media audit.
5. Platforms
Based on everything we’ve done so far, we can now decide what platforms your business will (continue) to use.
And then, we can decide what content you’re going to post on each platform since each platform has it’s own strategy, algorithm, and audience.
What do you do on each platform? Write it down.
6. Inspiration
Who are your favorite brands on social media? They don’t have to be in your industry. What do you like about it? Stay authentic and post what you like to post. This helps attract an audience that has similar interests and personality as you!
7. Plan
Creating a social media content calendar can be overwhelming, in the beginning you don’t need to plan exactly what you’re going to post.
I recommend planning what you’re going to post on each day of the week, what kind of content you’ll post, what platforms will it be posted to, and even when you’ll engage with your audience via comments or stories.
How much content will drive people to your website? How much will be about company culture? How much will inform or educate your audience? And how much is promoting your brand?
How many times are you going to post a day? A week? A month? Write it down.
I recommend starting small if you’re doing this on your own. Again, this should all be attainable!
8. Create
Now it’s finally time to create content for each platform! Based on everything above you can decide what kind of content you’ll be posting!
9. Analyze
Building social media cred takes time, 3 months minimum in my opinion. So, you won’t hit it on the first try, but setting up metrics in the beginning is important for this step, and is how you will measure growth.
Based on what you analyze, you can be constantly adjusting your goals, inspiration, planning, and creation!
10. Learn
Social media is always changing. New updates come out daily. Staying on top of what does well and what doesn’t in general can help you redefine goals and reassess your plan. A social media manager can help with this greatly and help you stay on top of platform changes, trends, and your ever changing audience.
Its important to remember that nothing is set in stone. Social media platforms, software, trends, and people change constantly. Your social media strategy document should be regularly referenced and updated in order to reflect these changes.
Need help outlining your social media strategy?
