Like with anything let’s take a moment to evaluate the ‘why’ for a second. So, why do you need a social media strategy in the first place? Why shouldn’t you just post content as you go? And wouldn’t following a ‘formula’ be the opposite of setting me apart from my competitors?

Here’s everything you need to know.

A social media strategy in essence is everything you want to achieve with your social reach. it’s your rule book to guide your actions through each network. Essentially, making you reach your brand goals keeping your purpose in mind.

Also, like anything new, it’s an unnerving experience. Therefore, a plan helps. The more specific, the more effective. So, let’s get into it. 

Broken down are 8 steps you need to create an effective social media strategy for your brand.

Step 1: Set Goals To Match Your Objective

The first question you have to answer is why does your brand wants to be on social media and what does it hope to gain out of it. These are simple yet significant questions you need to answer before you set out to build a strategy for your brand. 

Your brand’s goals can be any one (or more than one) of these:

• Increase Brand Awareness
• Enhance Engagement
• Increase in Sales
• Increase in lead generation 
• Improvement in Website Traffic

These can be further broken down into goals and metrics to measure those goals. For example, if your goal is to increase engagement for your brand then you need to measure metrics like comments, follows, likes, shares, retweets, etc.

To start with, pen down a minimum of 3 goals for your brand’s social media strategy.

Step 2: Define Your Target Audience

Clearly defining who your target audience is and what their needs and desires help you convert them from followers to consumers of your product or business. Understanding your audience paves the way for answering the next few questions. 

So, to begin with, it is important to know as much as you can about them and that includes their: 

age, location, job, income, lifestyle and spending habits, interests, challenges, etc. 

You can gather this data through your social media platforms insights, google analytics, or your available customer database.

A huge opportunity that many brands don’t take advantage of is building a buyer persona. It’s a great exercise to better target your ideal customer and make content that they resonate with and engage with. 

You can do that by putting all your research together and finding common characteristics. A general guideline is to create the persona of an already existing customer as well as a potential customer.

Vector Note: No bio or lorem ipsum text below it. Demographic can just be ‘Age’, ‘Gender’, etc without the information added after (i.e. ‘38 years old’, ‘Man’, etc). Instead of ‘Brandon Lee’ we put ‘Buyer Persona’. ‘Channels’ without the highlighted progress bar.

Now that you have your target audience in mind don’t make assumptions about where they are. Follow the numbers and pin down an exact answer. You can check out our blog on how to market on different platforms.

Step 3. Do a Social Media Audit

When you’re planning a social media strategy for a brand that’s already established it’s important to go back and see how your content was perceived:

• What worked and what didn’t work?
• Where your audience is engaging with you the most?
• What is their perception of your brand?
• And lastly, how does your brand presence compare with the competition?

Your audit should paint a clear picture of these questions and more. At the same time compare your audit with that of your competitors. These don’t have to be your closest competitions, you can start by taking factors like brand voice, engagement, type of posts, frequency, hashtags, keywords, social media management, etc. into account and matching it with that of your competitors, making a plan that works for your brand.

Step 4. Do a Competitive Analysis

Your competitors are already on social media (and if they’re not then you’re a step ahead of the game). This gives you an opportunity to not only see what’s working and what isn’t but to implement and learn from their mistakes.

Conducting a competitive analysis gives you a great sense of who your competition is, who their audience is, and how they choose to engage with them. Also gives you guidelines you can make for your brand based on their past activity.

To identify your competitors you determine keywords that best describe your brand and simply google search them and there you have at least 5 competitors pop up, either through ads or through their own organic ranking. You can also find similar brands your audience follows through Facebook audience insights.

After you’ve gathered a list you can check their social media and filter out the kind of content you think stands out as well as practices that you can implement for your brand.

Step 5: Establish Your Content Style

Once you’ve got an idea of what kind of content your audience or potential audience resonates with it’s time to plan out what type of content you would share.

This could be user-generated content, informative posts on a topic, educational videos on your niche, or high-quality visuals of your product. There is no need to restrict your brand to any one of those, in fact, you can keep mixing it up and trying different forms of content. This helps you create a range of content and engage your audience.

Look at your buyer persona, here’s where two factors come in that help you determine the type of content you need to put out and those are: the challenges your target audience faces and what you can do to solve them.

Step 6: Update Your Social Profiles

While it is important to find your audience where they are, it’s also important to maintain your brand’s presence on the 4 major social media platforms: Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin. This helps you find your mainstream audience as well as pop up on your google search result. 

After you’ve established your presence on these major platforms you can start looking into where your audience engages with you the most. Once you decide which platform to focus on you can alter your strategy accordingly, to accommodate the features that that platform has to offer.

For example, Twitter can be used to test out unique content, talk about trending topics and issues as well as reach out to customers as a form of customer support.

You can use the different features of these platforms to curate different content for each. Using the strengths to your advantage. 

7. Create a Content Calendar

Once we’ve established what we’re going to share it’s important to mark ‘when’ the content will go out in advance. To gain maximum impact it’s important to have a plan for your posts.

A calendar is a place you can plan all your posting activities across all your platforms – this includes your daily or weekly content to your social media campaigns. It also accounts for the time you spend interacting with your audience. Your calendar gives you a clear view of how spaced out your content is and who it’s reaching.

Everything you post should support your mission statement for each platform and a social media calendar helps in just that. You can reflect your target onto the calendar and come back to analyze it.

Another advantage of scheduling your posts is you can set the timing that your audience is the most active. For example, someone who works a packed 9 to 5 job might check their phone immediately after their shift, in the evenings.

8. Re-measure & Re-evaluate

Measuring what matters is the key to social media strategy sanity and success.

Every network has its own version of analytics. It’s easy to spend infinite time running reports. Make sure you are circling back to those measurable objectives.

Look at both quantitative for the hard numbers and qualitative for the sentiment and intent.

• Quantitative examples can be website sessions, number of email sign-ups, impressions, and social network data.
• Qualitative examples include sentiment such as positive reviews or comments on social messaging. For example, did you raise prices on the menu and have complaints on its Facebook Page?

Quantitative tells what happened and qualitative can usually tell the “why.”

Re-evaluate, test, and do it all again. Once this data starts coming in, use it to re-evaluate your strategy regularly. You can also use this information to test different posts, campaigns, and strategies against one another. Constant testing allows you to understand what works and what doesn’t, so you can refine your strategy in real-time.

All of this means that your social media strategy should be a living document that you review and adjust as needed. Refer to it often to stay on track, but don’t be afraid to make changes so that it better reflects new goals, tools, or plans.