Billions of people are on social media—many of them several times per day. That’s a whole lot of attention just waiting for your pithy post and clever content.
There are also thousands of brands taking up space in all of those feeds. You’ll need a solid social media strategy to stand out.
In this guide, we’ll show you how to build a social media strategy designed to help your business capture attention, build trust, and convert followers into customers.
Contents
- What is a social media strategy?
- Why create a social media strategy?
- How to build a social media strategy for your business
- 6 real-world social media strategies for inspiration
What is a social media strategy?
A social media strategy is a plan that outlines how you’ll use social media to support your business objectives. Think of it like a roadmap that defines your destination and lists the routes, people, and tools you’ll use to get there.
Your strategy will answer questions like:
- Which social media platforms will you use?
- How will you target your audience?
- What kinds of content will you publish?
- How will you increase engagement?
If this sounds a little too confining for your creative mind, don’t worry! Social media strategies should be a flexible framework that guides your team but has room to experiment and shift as you learn.
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Why create a social media strategy?
We know why marketing on social media is huge. Nearly 90% of the US population is on social media, and about a third of that huge number regularly uses it to discover new products, services, and brands.
But why do you need a strategy for social media marketing? Here are four reasons to consider.
It keeps your work focused on your goals
Social media marketing can be a lot of fun. It’s open to creativity. And you get to interact with people who hopefully share some of your interests.
But it’s important to remember that if you’re using social media to promote your business, the time you spend there should move you toward that objective.
Have fun and share a meaningful message, but remember your purpose while marketing on social media.
A well-crafted social media strategy is a document you can refer to repeatedly to remind you of the business objectives you set. It’ll also keep you and your team grounded in the plan you made to grow.
Keeps you consistent
Your social media strategy becomes your accountability partner, making sure you post the right content at the right cadence.
When it’s codified in a strategy, your team has guidelines to follow. They’ll be better able to maintain consistency in brand, tone, voice, and visuals.
A strategy helps you keep a constant vibe across your social media accounts.
Plus, you’ll always have an expressed goal for publishing a certain number of times per week or month. That’ll help keep you filling your feed with great content.
Backs your decisions with data
You’ll learn what works best as you gather feedback from your followers. Specifically, you’ll see which type of content they love, when you should post it, and how they want you to engage in replies and comments.
Your strategy is the single source of truth where the insights from that data live. Do your customers prefer video to static image posts? Do contests and giveaways work really well, but only on weekends? All that learning becomes much more useful when you coalesce it into a single document and use it to guide future activities.
Prevents social media mishaps
Nobody wants to deal with a social media crisis. Too often, they happen because someone on the team wasn’t on the same page; they went off script and posted something seemingly innocent that didn’t hit the mark.
Kellogg’s CEO could have used a social media strategy.
A strategy then can also act like a set of guidelines to help anyone who posts on your brand’s behalf maintain the same ethos. Are you political in your messaging? What topics do you focus on? How do you react to competitors? All of that can be included.
How to build a social media strategy for your business
Your strategy doesn’t have to be an in-depth, 100-page document. It can start with just a few components and grow as you try and learn. Here’s how to begin.
Set SMART goals
Before you can draw a map, you need to know where you’re going. That’s where SMART goals come in handy.
The “S” in SMART stands for specific, and that’s what we’ll focus on here. Include in your strategy:
- The metrics that define success: If your goal is to grow your audience and awareness, then views and likes are your main metrics. Need sales? Track conversion metrics.
- Benchmarks: Note where you are now and where you want to be in a set period of time. Your competitors are a good source of benchmarks when starting out, so spy on them at will.
Identify your target audience
Along with success goals, you’ll need to identify your target audience, i.e., the people who you really want to attract with your social media strategy. Gaining a million followers feels good, but if none of them will ever buy what you sell, it’s not going to help our business grow.
A baseline to start with is reviewing common characteristics among your best customers. Note their location, age, job title, interests, buying habits, and other demographics. Use that information to build a basic target audience profile and let it guide other aspects of your strategy. These target audience examples will help.
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Choose the best social media platforms
One thing you’ll learn from your target audience is which social media platforms to focus on. For example, if your ideal customers skew older, you may want to invest more heavily in Facebook.
Other factors will play into this decision. For example, if your product is very visual, you’ll lean towards in-feed Instagram posts. If you have explainer or customer testimonial videos, YouTube or TikTok may be better.
Create a content plan and calendar
Here’s where the strategy rubber hits the execution road. With your audience, goals, and platform(s) in mind, plan out what you’ll post and when for next month, quarter, or even the full year.
Not sure where to start? Try the 50/30/20 rule:
- 50% value-focused: Gear half of your social media posts to help your audience understand or do something.
- 30% curated: Repost and share content from other creators for 30% of your plan.
- 20% promotional: Use the last 20% of your posts to promote your products, events, or sales.
Plan for engagement
The magic of social media is the network effect. When you connect with one person, you have a chance to connect with their entire network, and then those’ entire networks, and so on.
You can speed up and amplify the network effect by regularly liking and commenting on posts by other accounts. And, of course, replying to the comments on your posts.
Here’s another cool rule to guide the engagement portion of your social media strategy. It’s called the 5x5x5 rule. There are different versions of it, but the one that works best here is:
- 5 minutes: Spend 5 minutes every day on this strategy.
- 5 likes: Give five posts from other accounts a like (or love, clap, etc.).
- 5 comments: Comment on five posts from other accounts (make them meaningful and additive; empty, performative comments could hurt your brand).
As a bonus, reviewing all that content will spur new ideas for your own account.
Establish regular reporting
You can’t grow what you don’t watch. Make sure to include a plan for when and how you’ll review and report success. That means knowing where you’ll find the metrics from the first step, how you’ll gather and present them, and how often you’ll do it.
For most brands starting out, a quick weekly review of the overall numbers and the top-performing post, followed by a more detailed monthly review, is great.
On top of regular reporting, set a time to complete a full social media audit. It sounds daunting, but it’s pretty easy with the right audit and template. Aim to run an audit once per year.
6 real-world social media strategies for inspiration
Now that you have the bones of an amazing social media plan, let’s look at some specific strategies successful brands use to drum up engagement and rake in more sales.
1. Educate your audience
Regardless of what your social media goals are, educating your audience is always a smart route to take. If you provide valuable information and/or practical advice, people will look to you as an authority and, in time, may become loyal customers.
Share your expertise with your audience and gain their trust fast.
What’s impressive about this strategy is that almost every business can use it, big or small. Why? Because you have knowledge that your followers don’t. That’s social media gold!
You can either educate your followers directly on social media or by using your accounts to direct them to educational resources such as blog posts, white papers, and webinars.
2. Add in a pinch of storytelling
Stories are captivating. Use them to highlight why your products are unique and worthy of your audience’s money.
Add a little element of storytelling to your captions to capture more attention.
Storytelling makes things relatable. It puts benefits in context and endears people to the “why” behind your what.
Since much of our decision-making is feeling-based, stories that push emotional triggers tend to do a better job of promoting action than constant self-promotion.
3. Produce diversified content types
It can be easy to find yourself only posting pictures on Instagram, only posting short tweets on X (formerly Twitter), and so on. But remember, most popular social media platforms let you post multiple types of media. Why diversify the kinds of content you share, though?
For one thing, producing the same content type endlessly can bore your audience. For another, you may learn that your target audience (or subsets of it) responds enthusiastically to one type of content on one topic and another when you’re presenting something else.
A variety of content types will add flavor to your feed.
So, break up the monotony by creating and sharing various types of social media content. You’ll learn a ton about what your audience wants from you and be able to keep them engaged long-term.
4. Try micro-influencer marketing
Partnering with respected and well-connected influencers is a wise idea for several reasons. In addition to a credibility boost, it’ll give you instant access to a whole new engaged audience.
It’s usually better to find an influencer with a smaller, more engaged audience.
Micro-influencers can be a really smart way to start. They may have smaller followings, but the audiences of micro-influencers are more engaged and dialed in. So, the people you connect with as a result of your partnerships are more likely to be your ideal customers and more willing to engage with you. (Plus, micro-influencers are often easier to get in touch with and persuade than social media superstars.)
5. Embrace video and live-streaming
Admittedly, video marketing and live streaming aren’t new. But it continues to be a growing trend in marketing.
Video is a versatile option for most social media platforms.
The great news is that you don’t need a big production studio or even a high-end camera to create video content your audience loves. A smartphone and some behind-the-scenes action or an unboxing of your product will do the trick.
6. Be relatable
To be fair, this is less of a single tactic and more of a way to improve all other social media strategies. Marketing can feel cold and impersonal at times. Put a face to your brand, throw in a little humor, respond to comments, or share mistakes. All those things will remind followers that there are real people behind the account.
Using you or your team in funny skits and replying to comments are two great ways to humanize your social media content.
Don’t forget to add reminders to be human to your actual strategy. It sounds silly, but we’ve all seen plenty of brands that seem to forget they’re people talking to other people.
The best social media strategies are unique
We’ve offered a framework to build your social media strategy and shared some examples. But the truth is, every strategy should be unique to the business it’s built for. That means considering your brand’s resources, goals, industry, and audience.
Contact us if you need some help building and executing your social media marketing plans. We can show you how we’ve helped other businesses like yours get leads and sales from social media.
