What is a social media strategy?

Do you have a social media strategy for your business? Do you know what a social media strategy is? We’ll tell you exactly what it is, why it’s good for your business, and what it definitely isn’t.

What a social media strategy isn’t

A social media strategy isn’t simply posting on whatever social channels you or your business happen to be on, whatever occurs to you, when it occurs to you.

More than that, a social media strategy isn’t just posting on social media because you think you should, with the expectation that something positive – but you’re not sure what – will happen.

What a social media strategy is

A social media strategy is a plan of what you are going to do on social media, on which channels, with what kind of content, and what you hope to achieve. The strategy is informed by data, as to what’s working and not working.

The data is then reviewed at set intervals to assess the effectiveness of the strategy.

In other words, a social media strategy is the exact opposite to the ad-hoc posting as and when you feel like it approach.

So how should I go about making a social media strategy?

1. Set your goals

What do you want to achieve? Here are some examples:

• Increase brand awareness
• Grow your community by getting more followers
• Improve engagement
• Drive traffic to your website
• Get more sales

These may seem like obvious goals, but without defining them, you can’t measure the success of your activity. Remember, your goals must be SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and within a timeframe.

2. Understand your audience

Don’t assume you know where your audience and customers are. Do some research on social media statistics to understand more deeply about what your audience want from their interaction on social media.

LinkedIn is thought to be good for business-to-business marketing and used by a well-educated audience. Instagram is thought to be for shoppers, and TikTok for young people. More women hang out on Pinterest than men. It’s information of this kind that could be useful for you to understand to make sure you’re putting your social efforts in the right places.

There are so many insights available online to enable you to better understand your audience. And of course, there is the good old-fashioned research of checking out your competition and how they interact with their audience. Is there anything you can learn from here?

A word of advice: don’t try and be present on all platforms. It’s best to pick two or three channels and post quality content rather than spread yourself too thinly.

3. Set your goal metrics

The key here is data. If you want to increase brand awareness and increase engagement, decide how you will measure that. Will you measure clicks, likes or shares? Ensure you know what your starting position is regarding this data and decide on where you’d like to get to.

Your goal metrics must be measurable.

Other examples are that you may want to increase positive engagement with a certain hashtag, measure how well particular hashtags perform, or the increase in click-throughs to your website.

4. Create the content

This is usually the step that those without a social media strategy jump to, without any clue who, how and why they are trying to engage on social media.

Remember, quality over quantity. By now you know who your customers are and why they’re on social media so you should be able to speak to them more precisely in your images and messaging.

Remember to post content that is:

• On-brand visually and speaks your values
• Tells your audience why they need you in their life
• Video content
• Shows the people behind the brand

5. Be timely, be available

The time of day you post matters. Look at the engagement you achieve when posting at different times of the day. The timings will be different for different members of your audience.

And you’ll need to be available to answer and like comments, and answer questions. There’s nothing more guaranteed for a follower to ‘unfollow’ than leaving a glowing comment unacknowledged, which will damage your engagement metrics.

6. Review, adjust, repeat

Your strategy should constantly change according to what you find is working and what isn’t. So, set a deadline for review and concentrate on the data to understand what it is about the posts that been so successful, then replicate those aspects going forward.

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