How to Create the Ultimate Social Media Strategy
Social media marketing is no longer a luxury for brands or businesses—it’s an essential component of any successful online presence. With a diverse range of demographics actively engaging on social networks globally, being present on these platforms is crucial for engaging, influencing, and converting your audience.
Consider these compelling statistics from Datareportal’s Global Social Media Report:
- Over 5 billion people are active social media users, making up 62% of the world’s population.
- The average person spends 2 hours and 20 minutes on social media every day.
- YouTube leads in active users, closely followed by WhatsApp and Facebook.
- On average, individuals use 6.7 different social platforms each month.
These figures highlight the significant role social media plays in daily life. However, simply being active on social platforms isn’t enough. You must understand how to effectively communicate with and serve your audience, share engaging and informative content, enhance brand visibility, and generate leads.
In this blog post, we’ll delve into the crucial components of social media marketing:
- What is a Social Media Strategy?
- Benefits of Having a Social Media Strategy
- 8 Steps to Building a Social Media Strategy
- Great Examples of Social Media Strategies (B2B, B2C, and Non-Profit)
What is a social media strategy?
A social media strategy is a detailed plan that outlines your objectives on social media, the tactics you’ll employ to achieve them, and the metrics you’ll track to measure your success. It aims to enhance brand awareness and engagement across various social media platforms, attract leads, and nurture customer relationships with your target audience.
What are the benefits of having a social media strategy?
you might have experienced a successful social media campaign or received great engagement on a particular post. Achieving a one-off success is possible.
However, maintaining consistency in social media marketing is the challenging part. Do you know why that campaign or post succeeded? Can you easily replicate its success?
While creating a social media strategy might seem daunting, it offers numerous tangible benefits for your business:
- Provides Direction: Guides all your social media activities.
- Enhances Brand Awareness: Improves visibility and recognition of your brand.
- Offers Customer Service: Facilitates social customer support.
- Improves Targeting: Enhances audience targeting across different platforms (e.g., Facebook vs. TikTok).
- Increases Website Traffic: Directs more visitors to your website.
- Personalizes Content: Tailors content to your audience.
- Generates Quality Leads: Attracts better-quality leads.
- Creates Influencer Opportunities: Opens doors for social media influencer collaborations.
- Enables Social Commerce: Facilitates shoppable posts and social commerce.
- Gathers Data: Provides data for analysis and measurement.
- Promotes Unique Content: Increases the chances of viral content (like McDonald’s “Raise Your Arches” campaign).
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What are the steps in building a successful social media strategy?
Now that you understand the basics of a social media strategy, let’s dive into the specific steps needed to create one.
We’ll also point out where to incorporate your content strategy and engagement strategy into your overall social media activities to ensure comprehensive coverage.
Here are steps to creating a successful social media strategy
1) Set goals for your business
Spending time on this stage is crucial because understanding and defining your social media goals will shape the rest of your strategy.
Consider what your business aims to achieve through social media. Remember, marketing and business goals can differ. Are you seeking greater brand awareness, learning more about your audience, expanding your following, or generating more leads?
While you might want to achieve all these objectives, it’s essential to list each one clearly since they will require different content and tactics.
When setting your goals, define your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to identify which social media metrics matter most. Research from Sprout Social highlights the key metrics that marketers monitor on social media.
To succeed on social media, establish metrics for each platform you use. For example:
- Facebook: Track reach, engagement, and impressions.
- Instagram: Monitor interactions, profile visits, and Stories discovery.
- Twitter (X): Focus on follower count, shares, and link clicks.
Beyond basic metrics, you can delve deeper by tracking audience growth rate, amplification rate (how often users share your content), and virality rate
2) Research your audience
to create personalized messaging and content, it’s essential to understand your audience and their needs.
The ultimate goal is to have customers talk positively about your brand or product/service, thereby influencing others through word-of-mouth marketing.
Achieve this by conducting market research through:
- Online surveys
- Customer interviews
- Focus groups
- Polls on platforms like Twitter (X), LinkedIn, or Threads
- Gathering opinions and feedback through apps like WhatsApp
Additionally, engage in social listening using various tools to monitor conversations across social networks like Facebook, Instagram, and Google Ads.
Both methods will help you create detailed buyer personas, combining buyer profiles and insights to form a clear picture of your ideal customer. You can have multiple personas to capture different insights, demographics, and pain points.
As Rand Fishkin mentioned on a recent DMI podcast, “The marketing and positioning process, brand strategy, content generation, and thoughtfulness have to come from a human being who cares about what other people think of them and their product and can put themselves in the shoes of their customers. The thing that will make you (as a marketer) great at customer empathy is also going to make you great at brand marketing, positioning, and content strategy.”
3) Analyze your competitors
Conducting a competitive analysis is a vital component of your social marketing strategy. It allows you to understand your competitors’ activities in the social media landscape.
Here are some key areas to gain insights on:
- Social platforms used (which ones and how many)
- Messaging style (tone and voice)
- Target audience per platform
- Branding (application of their brand or style guide)
- Content types and formats
- Campaign types (company news, polls, promoting gated content, etc.)
- Posting frequency
- Customer interaction strategies
- Use of influencers
- Integration of social commerce
By understanding how your competitors engage with their audience and the success of those efforts, you can either replicate their strategies or take a different approach to capture your customers’ attention
4) Choose your social platforms
he question isn’t whether you should be active on social media, but rather how to choose the best channels for your business.
Avoid the mistake of trying to be active on every platform just for the sake of it; not all will suit your business or content. So, how do you narrow down your choices and optimize content for each social network?
Facebook: As one of the largest and oldest social media platforms, Facebook offers a targeted way to engage with prospects and customers. Many content types perform well here, and Facebook Live provides a way to connect with customers through video. For example, Oreo effectively uses humor to engage with its audience through GIFs and other content. Check out our simple guide to setting up a Facebook Business page.
Instagram: This visual-centric platform continues to be popular among younger audiences and has experienced significant growth in recent years. It’s an excellent platform to showcase products and connect with influencers to expand your customer base. Additionally, with in-app shopping via shoppable posts, customers can make purchases directly on the platform.
LinkedIn: Ideal for B2B marketing, LinkedIn is a powerful platform for building professional relationships and establishing your brand as an industry leader. It’s perfect for sharing insightful content, industry news, and thought leadership articles. LinkedIn Groups offer opportunities to engage in discussions and network with like-minded professionals. Additionally, LinkedIn Ads can target specific industries, job titles, and companies, making it easier to reach decision-makers.
Pinterest is a hub for social discovery, where users come to find inspiration through images and videos. Its vast collection of pins spans diverse interests, from home decor to recipes, making it an ideal platform for content curation—essentially acting like a social mood board.
YouTube: Someone somewhere right now is watching a YouTube video. In 2024 it’s taken the top spot from Facebook as the most popular social platform based on users! YouTube provides a way to connect with customers in a way that provides information but can also offer entertainment.
If you’re a brand that creates a lot of videos, particularly how-to or tutorials, this could be the platform for you. It’s also a great discovery platform with many people using it as a search engine, so think about SEO for YouTube
Threads, Meta’s microblogging platform, presents itself as a competitor to X. It enables users to share text updates and participate in public conversations.
Threads includes features like saved posts, drafts, the ability to add images to posts, trending topics on the search page, and a personalized ‘For You’ feed. As the platform evolves, it remains one to keep an eye on.
5) Plan your content
Now that you’ve conducted your research and selected the appropriate social media platforms, it’s time to focus on your content strategy and approach.
Mark Pollard, Author and CEO of Sweathead, shared valuable insights in a recent DMI webinar on social media strategy, emphasizing key factors for developing your brand:
- Target Light Purchasers: Focus on attracting the 20% of consumers who make occasional purchases rather than the heavy purchasers who constitute less than 5%.
- Long-Term Brand Investment: Building a brand requires significant time and financial investment, leading to sustained sales growth over time.
- Message Clarity: Avoid diluting your brand by limiting the number of messages you communicate, ensuring each message is memorable.
- Emotional Connections: Triggering emotions helps build strong brand associations and memories among your audience.
- Brand Fame: Strong emotional connections can elevate brand awareness and fame.
- Brand Assets: Utilize consistent brand assets like logos, characters, colors, slogans, and fonts to deepen emotional connections with your audience.
- Authentic Content: Natural content, such as genuine product shots and real interactions, tends to resonate more with audiences than staged content with celebrities.
- Effectiveness of Celebrities: While celebrities and influencers can be effective, ensure their promotion aligns with your brand values rather than focusing solely on their personal brand.
- Creative Content: Innovative and creative content plays a crucial role in driving profitability.
- Attention and Engagement: Most ads fail to capture attention, with 80% missing the threshold of 2.5 seconds.
- Shareable Content: Awe-inspiring content that connects with personal or societal aspirations tends to be more shareable.
When planning your content, follow these steps:
Establish a Tone: Define the personality of your brand—formal or informal, humorous or serious—tailoring it to fit each platform’s unique atmosphere.
Develop Content Themes: Identify unique selling points (USPs) and create content themes or buckets. For instance, a travel resort could showcase wellness, local attractions, and unique wildlife or scenery.
Create a Content Calendar: Maintain consistency by scheduling regular posts across multiple channels using a content calendar template.
Schedule Content: Stay organized and maintain posting consistency by scheduling content in advance to keep up with the fast pace of social media.
What makes a good social media post?
After researching and selecting the appropriate social media platforms, it’s time to refine your content strategy and approach.
Mark Pollard, Author and CEO of Sweathead, shared valuable insights during a recent DMI webinar on social media strategy, focusing on key factors for building your brand:
- Target Light Purchasers: Concentrate on attracting the 20% of consumers who make occasional purchases rather than the less than 5% who are heavy purchasers.
- Long-Term Brand Investment: Building a brand requires substantial time and financial commitment, leading to sustained sales growth over time.
- Message Clarity: Ensure your brand message is clear and memorable to avoid diluting its impact.
- Emotional Connections: Triggering emotions helps forge strong brand associations and lasting memories with your audience.
- Brand Fame: Cultivate strong emotional connections to enhance brand awareness and recognition.
- Brand Assets: Consistently use brand assets such as logos, characters, colors, slogans, and fonts to deepen emotional ties with your audience.
- Authentic Content: Genuine, natural content like product shots and real interactions resonates more with audiences than staged content involving celebrities.
- Effectiveness of Celebrities: If using celebrities or influencers, ensure their promotion aligns with your brand values rather than overshadowing them.
- Creative Content: Innovative and creative content drives engagement and profitability.
- Attention and Engagement: Given that 80% of ads fail to capture attention beyond 2.5 seconds, focus on creating engaging content.
- Shareable Content: Content that inspires awe or resonates with personal and societal aspirations tends to be more widely shared.
When planning your content strategy, consider these steps:
Establish a Tone: Define your brand’s personality—formal or informal, humorous or serious—and tailor it to each platform’s unique atmosphere.
Develop Content Themes: Identify your unique selling points (USPs) and create thematic content buckets. For example, a travel resort could highlight wellness, local attractions, and wildlife.
Create a Content Calendar: Maintain consistency by scheduling regular posts across multiple channels using a content calendar template.
Schedule Content: Stay organized and maintain posting consistency by scheduling content in advance to keep pace with the dynamic nature of social media.
Great sir