Concise and attainable goals lead businesses to social media success. A social media strategy is a detailed plan with steps to achieve social media goals and metrics to track performances. Different strategies are needed for different platforms, audiences, and industries.
Most social media campaigns achieve success when they have a long-term social media plan. A business’s social media goals must align with its broader digital marketing objectives. Comprehensive strategies are more specific to action plans and roles and responsibilities within the team.
7 key steps to create a strategy for social media:
An impactful social media plan helps achieve goals like increasing brand awareness, generating leads, and building customer relationships. Below are 7 steps that allow understanding how to create a social media strategy.
1. Align goals with business objectives.
Social media teams must measure success and ROI (return on investment) over time by keeping clear objectives and goals in alignment with business objectives. Audience research and social media planning also act as a base to achieve marketing goals. Visual metrics like the number of followers and likes are easy to track but provide little insight. So, Businesses must monitor things like engagement, click-through, and conversion rates to better understand what is working.
Social media metrics tracking
A social media team can develop better strategies by tracking different goals and uses for various social media platforms. For example, if a brand uses Instagram for brand awareness, the success metric that can be tracked is Instagram story views. For a website that uses LinkedIn to drive traffic, the success mark can be measured as the click-through rate of that website. The table below explains which metrics can be monitored to track business and social media goals.
| Business goals | Social media goals | Metrics |
| Finding potential customers/ brand growth | Awareness | Impressions, followers, growth shares |
| Influencing people | Engagement | Comments, likes, mentions, etc |
| Drive leads and sales | Conversions | Websites, clicks, email signups, sales, etc |
| Earn loyalty | Customer sentiment | Testimonials, social media connections. |
Initially, it is better to pick three social media goals to avoid being overwhelmed and have a clear strategy. Picking goals can be simplified by matching goals to business and metrics to goals, which makes it easier than posting and tracking everything.
2. Understand your audience.
While developing a detailed social media strategy, businesses must consider a varied demographic of customers or followers. It is crucial to understand their wants, needs, and ways of engaging with social media. Then, the social media team can devise a strategy to target them as an audience. Social media analytics provide all the information about followers: who they are, where they live, and how they interact with social media. All these insights help social media strategists customize their strategy and target the audience.
3. Analyze the strengths and weaknesses of competitors.
The competitive analysis allows you to tweak the social media strategy, addressing the gap in the industry. It will help the social media team learn about the industry competition and how they can do better. This analysis will give you a layout of industry expectations, opportunities, and weaknesses. It will help and inform your social media campaign.
4. Conduct a social media content audit.
Conducting a social media audit helps create a performance-optimized content strategy for social media. The business must look at the metrics of different posts, and a social media audit helps note what is working well. The audit also helps answer questions like who engages with the brand and which collaborations are beneficial. This also allows the social media team to identify which platform has better ROI and how your competition performs.
A social media team can audit the posts based on performance and the use of an authentic brand tone. Then, businesses can allocate more resources to social media plans and platforms to reach their business goals through the social media campaign.
Also Read: The Impact of Visual Content on Social Media
5. Set up and optimize your accounts.
The choice of a social media platform also depends on the type of content the brand deals with. Facebook is an old platform with a different demographic. Instagram does well with visual content, and X or Twitter is suitable for surveys, verbal campaigns, and buzz. Different platforms have different pros and cons, and a social media strategy targets the platforms that benefit the brand.
First, a business must pick the social media platforms that work for its industry. The social media team creates accounts and aligns all social media accounts with brand value and the social media strategy. A customized social media plan sticks with brand colors, logos, and images. The algorithm focuses on high-quality images of set favored dimensions.
Social media optimization is vital for search engines, and a social media SEO helps. Clear and descriptive profile names, relevant hashtags, and keywords in bios, posts, captions, and alt text will optimize a social media page for social search.
6. Plan content for social media strategy
When crafting social media content, consider social media personas and the formats they consume. Planning and creating social media content requires a lot of data-driven creativity. While tracking metrics is essential, keeping posts new and non-repetitive is key to keeping followers engaged. And lastly, a social media team can quickly sort content types and formats by analyzing top metrics data.
7. Create a social media content calendar
A social media calendar is a way to envision the big picture of a content plan. A content calendar will make visualization and organization of ideas more accessible. The social media calendar will be the hub that helps execute the social media strategy successfully. Content calendar deals with scheduling the posts at the best times to post on different social media platforms. Try the 80-20 rule:
80% of your posts should inform, educate, or entertain your audience
20% can directly promote your brand.
In conclusion
The social media plan is a long game, where testing, evaluation and repeating are part of the strategy. Social media faces swift changes daily; part of the strategy is to be ready to try new trends and face demographic shifts. This means that social media strategy is always a work in progress, aiming for better goals, plans, and tools.
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