If you use social media as part of your digital marketing, creating a social media strategy will help you understand why you are using social platforms and most importantly how you intend to use them.
A clearly defined strategy will bring more focus to your goals and direction to your activities.
A social media marketing strategy is a clear and concise roadmap that defines what you want to achieve and how you will get there.
It will identify everything from your goals and metrics to optimising your profiles and engaging with your audience.
There are three parts to a social media strategy:
Launch – Defining your goals and choosing the platform
Connect – Profile set-up, optimisation and reaching your audience
Growth – Engaging with your audience, collaborations and working with influencers
The social strategy will act as a roadmap to guide you on your business journey.
Phase 1 Launch
In the launch phase your focus will be on goals and deciding which platform(s) to use.
Before exploring how to set goals, it is important to define the different types of goal that you could think about:
- Increasing brand awareness
- Generating leads
- Increasing engagement
- Building an audience and community
- Increasing web traffic
- Gathering information for market research
- Driving sales
There are many frameworks that you can use to set goals, but the most effective one is the SMART framework. SMART is built around five criteria:
Specific – The goal should be simple, clear and as defined as possible
Measurable – The most effective goals are tied to a metric such as conversions, click throughs or signups.
Achievable – Goals must be achievable with the resources that you have available
Realistic – Goals should be realistic
Time bound – State a timeframe for the goal.
An example of a SMART social media goal would be:
To increase email subscribers by 5% in the next 90 days.
Goal Setting Step by Step
Step 1 Start with Why
Start by listing all of the reasons why your business will use social media.
Note down as many ideas as you can think of.
Create a mind map and brainstorm ideas.
Step 2 Objectives
Refine your reasons to something more specific using the SMART framework.
Define 2-3 most important objectives.
The number of goals that you set can be endless and can cover the short, medium and long term.
Daily goals – Connecting, posting and engaging
Weekly goals – Posting user generated content, collaborations
Monthly/quarterly goals – Subscribers, sales, conversions, traffic
Step 3 Timescales
Set timescales for each of your goals. Keep in mind that a more complex goal would need a longer timeframe.
Step 4 Review and SWOT
Set a time when you will review the goal and identify how you know the goal has been met.
The review phase can also include a SWOT analysis of your social media presence when you have enough data.
The SWOT will cover strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats and will allow you to gain a deeper insight into your social presence and understand how you can shape future goals and performance.
Identify how often you will undertake a SWOT analysis. Typically, this should be quarterly.
Platform
Although there are many social platforms, it doesn’t mean that you have to be on all of them.
If you have the ability to do so you can, but most businesses are limited in terms of time and resources.
Be strategic with your choices.
There are many social platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, main social platforms.
It’s always best to work with 1-2 platforms, 3 at the most. Otherwise, you will find that the quality of your posts will decline, and you will find it increasingly difficult to maintain a consistent posting schedule.
Deciding which platforms to choose is essential so take some time to understand the features and functions of them all to choose those that are the best fit for your business. Most importantly, go where your audience spend most of their time.
Facebook is one of the most well-known social platforms, and according to Statista, the platform had around 2.2 billion active users in the last quarter of 2020.
It has its own ads platform, the facility to create a business page and features such as stories and Facebook groups.
Facebook Posts
Posting to Facebook offers users quite a lot of flexibility in terms of content types. Posts can be made up of text, video, images as well as links to external sources such as a blog post that you have written.
You could also create a news feed of discounts, offers and latest business news, linking followers to relevant products and pages on your website.
When developing themes or content ideas for Facebook remember that it is primarily a platform where people go to catch up with friends, be entertained or read funny stories.
Your posts therefore must reflect this light hearted, casual and conversational tone.
If a customer goes so far as to ‘like’ your business page this means that they are genuinely interested in seeing your content appear in their feed.
They want to keep up to date with news, information and promotions relevant to your business, see what’s happening behind the scenes and find out about the latest products.
As you start to build your audience you will get to know what types of content they prefer.
If you are a completely new business, review 5-10 competitors to see what types of content they are posting and what gets the most engagement.
Organic reach on Facebook has continued to decline in recent years to the point where it’s now non-existent, but there is a way that you can reach people organically through Facebook Groups.
More on that later.
When it comes to the frequency of your posts, avoid dominating people’s feeds with your content.
If they log into Facebook and see post after post from your business this is too much, and they are likely to unlike your page.
Post no more than twice a day and no less than once a week.
Engagement
As briefly mentioned, your posts receive little to no organic reach on Facebook there are two ways to increase awareness of your page.
The first is through paid ads.
Ads can work out expensive if you don’t understand how they work or the best way to create them to drive traffic to your page.
There’s so much to Facebook Ads and it’s far too detailed to go into here, but it’s worth looking at if you have a budget and you want to go down the paid socials route.
If you are not ready to explore the world of Facebook Ads right now, there is another way that you can increase awareness of your business page organically.
Facebook Groups – The Best Way to Grow Organically
While organic reach on the main feed is virtually zero, that doesn’t mean to say that you should write Facebook off in terms of increasing awareness and engagement organically, there is another way in the form of Facebook Groups.
New Facebook groups being launched all the time.
You may be a member of one or several already.
Use the Facebook search feature to enter keywords relating to your industry and you will be surprised about how many groups you can find.
Any that are of interest submit a request to join.
To grow your following on Facebook using the power of Facebook groups you will need to become an active member.
Be helpful, share tips, ask insightful questions, post valuable comments on other posts and so on.
With consistency and time, you will become known as one of the go to experts in the group.
If someone asks a question, people will start to recommend you as someone to ask.
In turn, people will become aware of the products and services you offer which will encourage people to visit, follow and engage with your Facebook posts.
LinkedIn is one of the oldest social media platforms established in 2003.
Although it’s not the largest, it has a user base of around 740 million members and is primarily a B2B and professional networking platform.
Content
LinkedIn is one of the most trusted social media platforms.
It’s a place where people go to consume high quality, authoritative content from businesses and brands.
There are many features on LinkedIn that are not available on other platforms such as the facility to create long form blog style posts.
Content should be relevant to your audience and show who you are as a person while educating connections on your business and what you do.
Popular content on LinkedIn includes industry trends and news, blog posts both from your business and others, how to tutorials and list posts, quick tips and updates as well as personal stories.
Employees, colleagues, people in your network or freelancers can serve as brand advocates too.
This allows them to share your business with their connections which will increase awareness.
When it is used in the right way and you find and build the right connections, LinkedIn can be a tool that not only increases brand awareness but one that generates leads (particularly in the B2B space) and builds authority and credibility in your niche.
Engagement
LinkedIn is first and foremost a professional environment for people to connect and network.
Therefore to maximise engagement your content should reflect this.
That doesn’t mean to say you can’t make your posts fun and creative, you can.
Show your expertise, be helpful and provide content as a resource that can help your connections on a personal or professional level.
Share the best of your business, stories that people can learn from, lessons you have learned and business insights from your company that they won’t be able to find anywhere else.
LinkedIn Groups
LinkedIn groups (similar to Facebook groups) can be helpful if you use them in the right way.
You can:
- Find out the most popular topics that are being discussed in your industry
- Share your knowledge and expertise with likeminded business owners and entrepreneurs
- Follow influential people in your industry or in the group by reviewing content from ‘Top Influencers’
- Search for topics or conversations that you can join to start engaging
The more connections you have, the more opportunities that you open yourself up to. But only if they are quality connections.
The LinkedIn Profile
Your profile is how you get found on LinkedIn and the first thing that prospective customers or connections will read about you.
Optimise your profile for relevant keywords.
Not only will you show up in LinkedIn search, you will appear in the Google search results too.
The more detailed and up to date your profile is, the better chance you will be found and contacted.
Complete your profile as carefully as you can and provide detailed information about your skills, experience and any wards that you may have received.
Be sure to add a photo (a professional head shot is best) or you can add a high quality image of your logo if you are using a company page.
Make sure that the photo represents your industry.
This could be the first impression that you make on a potential customer.
Basic Information and Summary
Don’t forget the headline which appears at the top of the page when someone views your profile and shows up in Google searches.
It is your first chance to make a good impression.
Include what you do and who you help rather than just a job title.
The ‘Summary’ section of your profile is where you can highlight your skills, services and accomplishments.
Capture the readers attention and get them thinking by letting your creativity and passion come through.
Contact settings
Your contact information lets your connections know what types of opportunities you are open to.
Options include consulting, new ventures, business deals, expertise requests and reference requests.
Website and Links
The links section of your profile is a great way to provide even more information to potential customers and your contacts.
If you have a blog, Twitter account or website include those links in the links section.
Perhaps one of the most controversial platforms, Twitter currently has 330 million active users as of the first quarter of 2019 and more than 500 million Tweets are sent through the platform every day.
Posting
Posts are made up of small snippets of text, with a maximum of 280 characters.
Content that works well includes promotions, contests, sales, memes, funny thoughts relating to your industry as well as new releases and insights.
There is also the option of ‘retweeting’ other valuable content that you find.
Frequency
Every second there are 5,727 tweets published meaning that the life span of your post is very short.
Post multiple times per day will maximise the opportunity for your tweets to be seen by your audience which in turn creates more opportunities for people to engage.
Engagement
Lead with value, but the value that you provide will depend on your audience, but keep it light and cheerful.
The most visual platform with 1 billion accounts and 500 million active users.
It offers multiple posting formats including stories, reels (short form video content), carousels and single image posts.
It’s a very visual platform with a focus on high quality images and video content.
Post
The type of content that you post will depend on where you are posting to, whether this is reels, the grid or stories.
Posts that appear on the main Instagram grid will include images, short videos and carousels that represent your brand.
Instagram allows you to build your own niche community while showing the who and the why behind your business.
Share your values, tell stories and demonstrate your expertise.
Captions can be used as a mini blog post to supplement your visual posts and is a place where you can ask questions to start a conversation and show your personality.
With posts taking up more space on the Instagram feed, there is a suggestion that people don’t read captions anymore.
But, as with anything in marketing, testing what works for you is the key to success.
There is also less focus on hashtags now and more on Instagram SEO.
Stories are ephemeral content which is much more casual and conversational.
Your feed posts should relate to your niche. Story content can be about anything and everything.
You can use stories to drive engagement on your page, to gather feedback, run polls and surveys,
ask questions and start conversations.
Frequency
The frequency of your posts should ideally be once per day for the feed and then at least one story per day.
Posting requires quality, value and consistency.
Find out what works for your industry and your business and be consistent.
Stories can be more frequent provided that you have great content to share.
Engagement
Engagement on Instagram is a two way process.
You must engage with others before you can expect people to engage with you.
In 2022, there have been many Instagram users expressing concern over the lack of engagement their posts receive.
This, coupled with frequent (often weekly) changes to the platform has caused significant frustration for many users.
If you want to be successful on Instagram in 2022, and particularly if you want to grow a new account, you must keep up to date with the latest changes and follow the latest best practice if you want your account to grow organically.
Focus on connecting with influencers, collaborating with others and engaging in a meaningful way.
YouTube
There are currently 2 billion active users on YouTube with over a billion hours of video content which is consumed on a daily basis.
It is the second largest search engine after Google and is a platform where people go for entertainment but also a place where people go to learn or find out about something.
YouTube is based on the publication of long form video content.
It has recently introduced YouTube Shorts for shorter form video content.
Setting up a YouTube channel can significantly boost credibility and drive engagement with your brand.
Optimise your videos to rank in search is huge in making sure your video ranks in search when users are looking for information.
Posting
How to content is one of the four top content categories
Audiences are looking for content to show or explain something
Post informational videos, instructional content, how to guides and tutorials, walk throughs, demonstration of software products or helpful user information.
YouTube users are three times more likely to watch a YouTube video than to read a set of instructions when learning something.
Two minutes is the ideal length of video but some business video content is much longer than this.
Share as much content as you can produce if you maintain high quality.
Engagement
Optimise your videos for SEO.
Use catchy titles, keywords, tag properly and view competitors to see how they are using YouTube.
A creative and visual social media platform that is designed around pins and boards.
A pin is essentially an idea that you have.
It could be an image, a creative concept, a product that you have or other creative way that you display ideas.
Your Pinterest pins can also link back to your website which makes it an effective tool to drive traffic to your website.
Pins help users of Pinterest find out about products that they are interested in.
One of the benefits of Pinterest over Instagram is that you can link individual pins back to a website such as a blog, a landing page or anywhere you would like the visitor to go to find out more information.
This significantly increases the opportunities that you have to get people to your blog or website to find out more information.
Pinterest can be thought of as a search engine for images.
If a user enters a keyword they will be presented with a list of images related to that keyword.
To maximise your chances of being found for the products that you sell, you will need to optimise the caption that will accompany the image around key search terms, just like you would if you were optimising a blog post for search.
There are three types of feed on the platform: Home, Explore and Following
Home – This will present a tailored collection of pins relating to the topics, people and boards that you choose to follow.
Explore – Browse trending topics and popular pins
Following – New content published by people you follow
You can also create boards which are similar to category pages.
Within each board you can have a selection of content based around that theme category.
To increase engagement with your pins you must create appealing images.
Product photos should be of the highest quality and as clear as possible.
Use images to capture attention so people will click on your image to learn more about the product.
As with many of the other platforms, your success on Pinterest relies upon the development of an active, engaged community.
You can do this on Pinterest by starting conversations, sharing information and ideas and sharing great content that your followers are interested in.
Develop an engagement strategy and remain consistent in your posting and engagement schedule.
TikTok
With more than 500 million active monthly users, TikTok is the latest social media platform to be released to the world.
The platform is built around short, fun, creative video content used to entertain followers, divided into two sections – the ‘For You’ page and ‘Following’
For you – Allows you to browse trending content and videos published by top contributors
Following – Video content created by people you follow
There’s also the Discover page that allows you to browse hashtag challenges and trends
If you are confident that your audience will use Tik Tok, keep your video strategy simple and lighthearted.
Showcase your products, launch a hashtag challenge with a branded hashtag and work with influencers on the platform.
Working with influencers on the platform allows you to establish a connection with an audience and attract some new followers while promoting your brand.
If you are working with influencers, ensure that the audience the influencer has is a good fit for you.
TikTok is a platform that won’t suit everyone, but if you are targeting the demographic of TikTok users, it can be a powerful tool to increase awareness of your brand.
Whichever platform you choose, think about where your target audience spends most of their time, what content they engage with the most and the problems that you can solve using your presence through these platforms.
Phase 2 Connect
The next step in your social media strategy is to set up your profiles for your chosen platform(s) and plan how you intend to identify and build your audience.
Profile Setup and Optimisation
The process of optimising your profile will ensure that your page is found by the right people – those who are most likely to convert into a paying customer.
Profile optimisation will depend on the platform, but there are a few things to look out for:
- Ensure that your profile is completed as fully as possible
- Provide links to other social media profiles if you can
- Include a link to your website, but don’t link to the home page. Direct the user to a landing page or offer. At the very least you want to capture their email address so send them to a mailing list sign up form.
- Across all platforms, make sure that your profiles are consistent with the same branding, profile image and cover photo
- Make sure that your username is something memorable and unique
- Optimise your bio around the people, problem, promise statement – who you help what problem you solve and how.
- If you are a product based business, you can also use the ‘tap to buy’ feature that is now available, particularly through the Instagram and Facebook shop.
Colours and Branding
Colour gives meaning to your page and can elicit certain responses.
When you use colours in the right way you can convey a mood, an image or your personality.
Colour Checklist
Red – Energetic, attention, speed and vitality
Blue – Safety, reliability, confidence and transparency
Orange – Modern, innovative, happy and funny
Green – Natural, hope, relaxation and peace
Yellow – Joy, optimism, creativity and compassion
Brown – Stability, durability and forever moments
Pink – Soft, nurturing, soothing
Purple – Luxury, mystery, quality and reliability
White – Clean, pure, innocence and peace
Black – Elegant and sophisticated
Whenever you are choosing the colour palette for your business, consider how the colours you choose will make your audience feel.
Use colour to reflect the moods that you want to convey through your posts, particularly on visual platforms such as Instagram.
The right colour scheme can help differentiate your business and give it a polished and professional look.
Once you identify the right combination of colours, try to remain consistent in your use of colour to make sure that all your posts complement each other.
When deciding which colours to use, think about the platform.
The primary colour for Facebook for example is blue so to avoid blending in you should try to stay away from this colour in your colour palette.
Test different colours and styles on different platforms, make the best use of available white space and vary the number and choice of colours you use.
Once you learn what works use the same colour scheme throughout and remain consistent.
Step 3 Grow
The third and final stage in the social media strategy is to plan how you would like to grow your page. This is achieved across three areas; identifying potential influencers you could connect with, your approach for engagement and the collaborations that you would like to look for.
Influencers
In every industry there will be a pool of influencers who can be an excellent platform to grow your business.
Start by brainstorming some of the types of influencers that you can work with and research who would be a good fit for your brand.
Also remember not to rule out micro-influencers.
You don’t need influencers with tens of thousands of followers to make an impact, you can still grow your brand with micro-influencers with in excess of 1,000 followers.
Engagement
- How will you engage with your followers?
- What will your engagement strategy look like?
- Engagement on social media is a two way process.
- What types of accounts would you like to engage with?
- How will you engage with new businesses? How will you find new businesses to engage with?
- What will engagement look like?
Collaborations
The final element is to start collaborations.
This could be featuring a business who complements yours in your stories or in a post in exchange for a post or a story on their feed about your brand, it could involve a guest post, shout-outs.
The people that you could collaborate with should be documented in your social media strategy.
Engagement on social platforms is often trial and error.
What works for one business might not work for another.
Why? Because businesses have different audiences, who respond in different ways.
Be social, start conversations with people every day and be helpful.
In time, your audience will grow.
With each of the sections in this social media strategy, make sure that it is documented.
Your social plan should be a working document that you revisit often.
It will show you what is working and most importantly, what isn’t.
The more you review and adjust your campaigns, the more success you will gain in the long term.