Simply being present on social media is not enough in today’s fast-paced digital landscape. You need social media content strategies that are clear-cut and fluid to connect with your audience and achieve your business objectives.
It’s not just about consistency – it’s a total approach to creating, publishing, distributing, and measuring content in a meaningful way and resonating with your target audience.
More than ever, you need a strong content strategy as a foundation for your social media content marketing efforts – if not, you will get lost amongst the noise of content available to your audience on social media platforms.
A solid content strategy creates a community around your brand and helps it cut through all the clutter to be noticed and valued.
Developing a Robust Social Content Strategy
A social content marketing strategy isn’t a simple process of coming up with posts – it is a strategic process guided by a strong understanding of not only your brand but your audiences and your platforms as well. In broad strokes, these are several steps you take to create your own unique, outcome-based social media content strategies:
1) Define Your Goals
Before you even create content, you need to know what you want to accomplish. You may want to increase brand awareness, bring traffic to your website, find leads, or drive sales. Your goals will determine what content you’ll create and what metrics are relevant for measuring your content’s performance.
2) Know Your Audience
Creating content your audience will appreciate begins with understanding WHO you are talking to. You want to do research to develop a better understanding of your target audience, their demographics, interests, challenges, and the social media platforms they are on! This crucial information is essential to creating buyer personas to inform what you create.
3) Analyze the Competition
Examine the competition to discover what they do best (and not so best). This will help you gain useful insights, generate new ideas, and find any spaces for your content.
4) Audit Your Current Content
If you’ve been using social media before now, review your past posts to discover past good content. Look for patterns in engagement, reach, and conversions to determine what your audience likes and what to continue to give them.
Crafting Your Winning Social Media Content Plan
After you establish your strategy, it is time to develop your social media content plan. This is a broader version of your strategy – it outlines the content you will provide, which platforms you will use and when, and what to post on each platform. It’s a step-by-step practical guide to provide you with consistent, meaningful content that fits into your overall strategy.
Diversify Your Content Formats
Don’t limit yourself to posting only words and links. Experiment with many other types of content to build your audience and engagement. Some examples of content include high-quality images, short-form videos (like Reels and TikToks), carousel posts, infographics, polls, and live video sessions, to name a few.
Visuals matter! Posts with images and videos consistently receive more clicks and shares than text-only posts.
Use Captivating Visuals and Captions
An outstanding visual may pause someone while they are scrolling, but a great caption is what encourages them to interact.
If you decide to use a caption, make sure it is attention-grabbing, artificial and informal in tone and as brief as possible, while maintaining the tone of your brand. Incorporate emojis and mentions to add personality and increase visibility.
Integrate Calls to Action (CTAs)
Every piece of content needs to have a purpose. CTAs will help your audience understand what you’d like them to do, for instance, “like this post”, “let us know your thoughts in the comments”, or “visit our bio for the link to learn more.”
Repurpose and Curate Content
You don’t always have to start from scratch. You can turn a blog post into a set of social media graphics or pull a long video into several short clips that others can share.
You can find reputable external sources and curate content from those sources to help you fill the gap in content and share valuable information.
Execution: Social Content Planning and Promotion
Having a solid social content planning process is essential to put your strategy and plan into action. This process involves organising your content and your posting schedule, along with engaging the community.
1) Build a Content Calendar
A content calendar is a crucial part of the planning process. Content calendars organize the posts, allow for a scheduling structure, give you a way to view your plan, track important dates and campaigns, and allow for planning to be shared with your team.
2) Promote Your Content Effectively
Don’t post and pray. Promote the content with hashtags that create discoverability. Tag other users and/or brands to increase the reach of your messaging, and ask your followers to share posts.
3) Leverage Platform-Specific Features
Each social media platform has specific features to increase engagement. Instagram has Stories and Reels. LinkedIn has thought leadership articles and professional discussions. X has threads to tell lengthier stories. Knowing these nuances is an important part of any social media content strategy.
Measure, Analyze, and Adapt
The last and most important step following you having an established rhythm is to analyse the performance of your available content. A data-informed strategy will let you confirm what is working and the things that are not, to allow for the refinement of your social strategy.
Track Your Metrics: Monitor your key performance indicators (KPIs), i.e., engagement rate, likes, comments, shares, reach, growth in followers, click rate, etc. Understanding your KPIs will inform you if your content resonates with the audience you intended or if you’re working towards your objectives.
Conduct A/B Testing: Try different styles of content, what time to post content, and different imagery. For example, you can use the same image (or video) and try 2 different captions, to see which caption got a greater amount of comments.
Be Authentic and Flexible: The social media content strategy will always be fluid. The digital space is always changing, and your strategy should always change too. Be authentic to your brand voice, and don’t be afraid to pivot your plans where the data, trends, or audience requests define it.
Through applying some of the strategies you have reviewed within this intended social media content strategy, you’re going to elevate your presence in a context that not only encourages followers but also establishes a community and produces business outcomes.
To master these social media skills and stay ahead in the industry, consider enrolling in digital marketing classes online to gain a deeper understanding of advanced techniques and best practices.
Also Read: The Transformation of Businesses with Data Science for Small Businesses