What is a Social Media Strategy?

Social media is easy to use, just post a few times and you're good, right? Not the case today. Social media users are savvy and gone are the days of fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants approaches to promoting your business on social media.

 

Your content has to grab attention and hold it just long enough to persuade users to follow, engage with, and ultimately buy from your business.

 

How do you do this? With a social media strategy! You've likely already heard of the term before. Let's further explore what a social media strategy is and what yours needs to include.

 

A social media strategy is a business document outlining how it'll approach using social media to promote your business and engage with prospects and customers. It outlines your goals for marketing your business with social media and how you'll gauge each goal's success.

 

Your social media strategy needs to be guided by goals. Whatever your goals are, these need to be addressed in your strategy so that the content you post is actively working towards achieving your goals.

 

Your strategy should also include the platforms you'll use with careful consideration of where your audience will be most active. Since each platform can do different things for your business, you'll want to outline the role each will play in achieving the goals you set out.

 

For instance, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok are highly effective for converting new prospects to buyers within the platform. Each platform offers metrics on when your followers are most active so you can time your newest content to go out when they're likely to be online.

 

With Twitter, you typically need to put out an average of 50 posts per day to perform well in the algorithm. This is an excellent way to raise brand awareness and build a community that'll want to sign up for your newsletters or follow you on other platforms, too.

 

If you already have buyer personas for your business, be sure to include those along with some market research about their social media habits in your social media strategy.

 

Another key component you'll need in your strategy is a social media calendar. This will ensure you can keep track of when content needs to go out so your team doesn't forget to post it or forget to create it in the first place.

 

You'll also need to include all the team members who will be involved in implementing the social media strategy. You'll outline who is responsible for different parts of the strategy as well as to whom everyone reports.

 

A social media marketing strategy is a key piece of your overall strategy. Each major social platform has wide audiences you can reach that would be interested in what you offer, but with hundreds of thousands of monthly active users, including other businesses, it'll take a well-researched and intentional approach to reach your social media goals.

 

Your strategy should include goals, metrics, platforms, buyer personas, team members, and a calendar to organize your assets. It should be easy for all team members to navigate to ensure consistent implementation of your social strategy to achieve your business goals.