As anyone with a business knows, effective, engaging content posted to social media can do wonders for your brand. Social media posting can help you gain more customers, create more awareness of your brand, and foster customer trust in your brand as a legitimate entity. However, this cannot be achieved without an effective social media content strategy. Every social media content strategy should be different and specifically tailored to the service you provide as a business, as well as your target audience and performance over time. However, there are steps you can follow to begin to put this plan in place and build a long term, sustainable and profitable social media content strategy.
Step 1: Identify your objectives and set goals.
The first and most important step is to work out exactly what your objectives and goals are for your business and your social media strategy. Once you know what your aims are, you can create content around this specifically focused on achieving these goals. This process involves thoroughly researching your audience, as well as thinking clearly about what your brand values are and what you’re trying to sell or promote.
Step 2: Research your desired audience.
Another important thing to consider when creating your social media content is who it’s for. Coming up with an avatar or a fictional representation of your ideal customer can help you hone in on ways to sell your brand to your target audience.
Step 3: Audit Your Social Media Performance
This step can often be make-or-break for your social media campaign. It involves working out which posts and tactics have worked well for you in the past, so you can improve your content and make sure it is seen and engaged by the most amount of people possible. You can do this by looking at your social media analytics.
Step 4: Conduct In Depth Competitor Analysis
Analysing your direct competitors is the best way to work out which types of strategies work best for your desired campaign. This will help spark ideas of how you should proceed, as well as show up parts of your strategy that you could improve.
Step 5: Choose Which Type Of Content You Want To Use
When choosing which type of content you want to put out, it is important to consider the knowledge you have obtained while following the previous steps. What content has worked well in the past? What types of content do your competitors often use? What would your ideal customer from your persona want to see? Often short form video content has proven to be very popular with customer engagement, but it’s worth exploring other types of content that would be relevant to you and your business.
Step 6: Use A Content Calendar
Content calendars are a very useful tool to organise and plan your social media content. It can help you visualise your content strategy and give you a big picture view of your campaign. You can either build a content calendar yourself or purchase one online, such as the one on Social For Brokers’ website!
7. Posting And Sharing Your Content
When it’s time to actually post and distribute your content, it is important to try to promote each post as much as possible to ensure that it reaches your desired audience. You can schedule your posts to come out at specific times such as when your desired audience is most active online (depending on your business, this could either be during the working day or afterwards when people have finished working). You can also use platform specific features, such as Facebook & Instagram reels, collaborate with other content creators, and importantly, encourage interested people to share your posts.
8. Reporting & Analysing Your Results
Perhaps the most important step in all of this is that your analysis of your results and self-auditing doesn’t stop when your campaign starts. The best social media content strategies are flexible and adaptable. You should still be checking on your performance and working out ways to improve audience engagement throughout your campaign, gradually refining it to reach peak performance.
While every campaign is different, following these 8 steps is a fantastic start to creating, improving, and mastering your social media content strategy.