Create a Social Media Strategy in 8 Steps

A mistake that businesses make on their social media platforms, is posting without having a plan in place. They post without knowing why they’re sending out the post and what they’re hoping to achieve from it.

Having a social media strategy in place will ensure that your social media efforts are working to support your overall business goals. It will let you know if your content is succeeding or failing to attract your target audience.

In this blog, I will help guide you through how to implement your own social media strategy to help you achieve your goals.

Step 1: SMART Goals

Before you do anything, you need to know what you hope to achieve through social media. Once you’ve found out what your overall business goals are, you can decide what you want social media to help you with. If you’re a B2C, maybe you want to increase sales? If you’re B2B, maybe you want to promote your brand and get more engagement?

Specific: An example of a non-specific goal is “to increase followers”. To make this specific you could say “to increase followers on Twitter by 7%”.

Measurable: Find a way to measure your goal. For example, if a goal is to increase engagement, ensure that you measure what content is getting the most engagement. This helps you find out what content you should be concentrating on making.

Attainable: Ensure your goal is realistic and achievable. An example of an unattainable goal, when you’re just starting out, would be “to gain 10,000 followers on Instagram a month”.

Relevant: Does your goal align with your overall business goals? If it doesn’t help you achieve your business goals, then you should rethink them.

Timely: Ensure you have a timeline for your goal to help you keep yourself accountable. An example would be, “to increase clicks to the website by 10% in two months’ time”

Step 2: Target Audience

A social media target audience is a group of people you have identified that you want to appeal to. A good way to start is by creating a customer persona.

• Who are your target audience?

• How old are they?

• What social platforms do they use the most?

• What kind of content do they like to consume the most? (Blogs, YouTube videos, short video content, podcasts etc.)

• What days and times are they using social media the most?

Finding out this information will help you create content your target audience will be interested in, and post it where they are going to see it.

Step 3: Competitor Analysis

• Who are your main competitors?

• What channels are they posting on?

• What type of content are they posting?

• Do they get much engagement?

You need to find out what your competitors are doing right and wrong. This will give you more ideas for what you need to be posting, and show you what you should avoid.

Find out where your audience is being underserved. For example, your target audience uses Instagram, but your competition is focusing more on Twitter. Use this to your advantage.

Step 4: Social Media Audit

A social media audit is the process of reviewing what's working, what's failing, and what can be improved on your social media channels. For example, you may find that a post about the features of your solution isn’t getting much engagement. However, videos showing your customers how to use your solution may get a lot of engagement. Now you know that you need to focus more of your time on video content.

Buffer has written a helpful article, “The 15-Minute Social Media Audit Everyone Can Do”, which I would recommend you read if you want to find out more on this.

Step 5: Choose Channels/Update Current Profiles

Now that you know where your audience is, where your competitors are posting and what channels you get the most engagement on, its time to choose your channels. Did you find out during your research that your audience uses TikTok the most, but you’re only on Facebook and Instagram? Its time to download TikTok.

Step 6: Content Calendar

A social media content calendar is used to plan out when and which content will be shared, manage campaigns, and track deadlines. It doesn’t matter whether you put together a spreadsheet or use a fancy app, if it includes the following:

• What are you posting?

• Where are you posting it?

• When are you posting it?

It's useful to use a social media scheduling tool to ensure that your content goes out on the exact time and date you want it to go out. There are many tools to chose from, some are free, and some aren’t. Find what works for you.

Examples include:

• Buffer

• Hootsuit

• SocialPilot

• SproutSocial

Step 7: Create Good Content

Start creating good, compelling content that your target audience will get value from. If you’re not posting content your target audience will be interested in, all your efforts will go to waste.

Step 8: Track It

Finally, you need to track your social media goals on a regular basis. If you don't track it, you're not going to know whether you're succeeding or failing. You can do this manually or use social media tools, but it needs to be done. You should track:

• New and lost followers

• Which post are getting the most and least engagement?

• Clicks to website

• Visitors to your page

• Are you on track to achieving your goals?

• What will you do better next week?

Did you know, in 2021, 54% of social browsers are using social media to research products? Even though creating a social media strategy may sound like a lot of work, if you don’t have one, you could be missing out on many benefits. Times have changed and social media is a big part of most of our lives and its not going away any time soon.