How to Create a Social Media Strategy
Six Ideas to Kickstart Your Social Stardom
As a business owner, you know that having an excellent online presence is a must. So you’ve done a bit of research, decided which social platforms you will be active on, settled on your branding and voice, and identified your target audience. Those are great first steps! But now you’re staring at a blinking cursor, waiting for inspiration to strike and bless you with an internet-conquering piece of content. But it’s harder than it sounds! You’re likely wondering: just how do you maximize social media content engagement, anyway? Well, it all starts with a strategy.
Planning Your Social Media Strategy
While there’s no “one size fits all solution”, there are some general guidelines on how to create content that will work best for you. Like any worthwhile project, it involves collecting data and doing a bit of research in order to set a foundation for success. Here are a few things to keep in mind and guide your way forward before you write a single post:
ONE – Define Your Goals: What’s the ultimate goal of your social media presence? Is it to establish brand awareness, generate leads, drive traffic to a site, or something else? A good strategy starts with a clear objective.
TWO – 70-20-10 Rule: It’s a golden rule of social media: use 70% original or relevant brand-building content that shares your story and unique value proposition, 20% shared or curated content from other social channels, and only 10% promotional or sales-focused content. This will help your posts feel more authentic while preventing your posts from appearing as spam.
THREE – Develop Your Content Themes: It’s hard to create any content without knowing what to talk about. Start by really focusing on the value you offer your customers. What is it that you promise them you’ll deliver through your product or service? What makes you or your business remarkable and differentiated? If you really understand this, it should be easy for you to see what kind of content you should be creating.
FOUR – Trial and Error: You’ll likely have to try a little bit of everything to start. Track how your posts perform and see what gets the most likes, comments, and shares. This will help you find out what your audience really connects with. You’ll have to do a bit of digging to get meaningful results, but the effort is worth it, in the long run, to let the data make the decisions.
FIVE – Listen & Ask Questions: Don’t have enough analytics or don’t know where to start? Get feedback from your audience! Ask questions in your captions, use surveys, polls, and games in stories, and engage in Q&As to discover what your audience wants to see and how they get value from your products or services. Look for other places where they might post questions such as Facebook Groups or Google Search queries.
SIX – Use Visual Media: Generally, people engage most with pictures and videos. That’s because you can tell more authentic stories through imagery. Use relevant and unique photo and video content to accompany your text to get more engagement. Professional photos and videos are great, but you can do a lot with a phone camera and by engaging your team to help capture moments throughout their day.
Social Media Next Steps
Laying a good strategic foundation is an excellent way to start on the road to social media success – but once you’ve got the “map” in hand, it’s time to think about the content itself. Knowing what kinds of posts get the best response from your audience is a crucial part of your online presence and appearance. But that is a different kettle of fish, for a different day.
We hope you found this useful. Remember – if you’d rather take a shortcut to the endgame, WJ’s social media specialists are at your beck and call.