Creating a social media strategy aims to have a plan of action to achieve your goals.
Have you defined your strategic plan?
Don’t worry, if you have not. In this article, we cover a step-by-step guide on how to create a social media strategy, the trends for this year, and tools that will help you achieve your goals.
What Is A Social Media Strategy
A social media strategy is all those detailed actions that will be carried out and that are part of the social media plan to achieve the company’s marketing objectives.
Why Is It important To Take Care Of Your Social Media Marketing Strategy?
It is very important to create and implement a social media strategy to build positive brand awareness that lays the foundation for engaging, interacting with and serving your audience.
Here are some of the benefits of creating a social media strategy:
- Improves brand awareness
- Serves as a market research
- Enhances customer loyalty
- Increases web traffic
- Allows capturing leads
- Helps sell your products and services
Social Media Strategy in 2023: Step-by-step Guide
Follow this step-by-step guide to create a social media strategy for your company in 2023.
1. Set your social media goals
The first step should be to give purpose to your social efforts. Once you have a purpose, you can determine the actions that will help you to achieve them.
The objectives that a company usually have are as follows:
- Raise brand awareness
- Drive website traffic
- Build social audience
- Boost engagement
- Generate sales conversions
We recommend you to choose one or two goals, and update from results.
Remember to define the SMART objectives—the ones that are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound.
For instance:
Build social audience – Increase social audience by 20% by the end of 4Q.
2. Define your metrics and KPI’s for success
Data determines the success of our actions. Therefore, the social media metrics and KPI’s that matter are the following:
- Followers – Increase in the number of followers in a given period with respect to the previous year.
- Reach – Number of unique users who saw your publication.
- Engagement – The total number of social interactions, divided by the number of impressions.
- Organic and paid likes – The total number of organic and paid likes.
3. List the challenges and think of possible solutions
Make a list of challenges and explain succinctly the barriers to reach your business goals.
Then, raise some possible solutions, and find out if you can implement them.
4. Determine the strengths and weaknesses of your company and your competitors
Use the S.W.O.T. framework to identify each competitor’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
Creativisocial Tip: You can create a company’s strength from your competitor’s weakness.
5. Audit your social networks and optimize them
Run a social media audit to see where you stand out.
1. Take Inventory Of Your Social Media Profiles
You can do that by searching the internet and the social media platforms.
2. Check Consistency In Branding And Purpose
Make sure that all social media profiles align with your current brand image and standards.
The information you can check out is:
- Profile and header images
- Bio
- Links
- Pinned posts
- Verified account
3. Identify Your Top-performing Posts On Each Platform
How can you identify this information?
- You can use the analysis tools integrated into each social network.
- You can use these free & paid social media audit tools
- Planoly: It provides advanced analytics for Instagram, and basic analytics for Pinterest.
- Buffer: Access to audience demographics, account analytics and stories analytics.
- Analisa: AI-powered Instagram and TikTok analytics platform that gives you customized reports.
- HypeAuditor: A software that can help you with key features as audience quality score, growth and engagement rate.
- ContentCal: It includes top-performing post analysis, detailed follower analytics, and organic data for LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter
4. Evaluate Channel Performance Overall
We can evaluate two main purposes:
1. Social Media Accounts Growth –
Are we growing consistently?
If not, what’s the cause?
2. Social Media Goals Achievement –
What is the business objective?
What are your social media goals?
Are we meeting them?
If not, could the results be improved?
Grab your social media strategy, and check if you met (or you’re meeting) your goals.
Now, if you don’t have them. It’s about time!
Related content: How to Conduct a Social Media Audit In Less Than 30 Minutes
6. Develop your buyer persona
A customer avatar is a fictional character that represents your ideal buyer in the market.
In order to create a customer avatar, take the following elements in consideration:
- Detailed information and background about their profile
- Wants, needs and pain points
- Why and how you can help them
Related content: The Complete Guide To Creating a Customer Avatar
7. Create a list of relevant keywords
Use social listening tools to see what are the relevant keywords of your industry.
- Buzzsumo – You can create alerts and get notifications if a relevant keyword is used online.
- Tweetdeck – Free social media listening tool. Just for Twitter.
- HubSpot – It allows you to create keyword monitoring streams.
8. Research industry content and trends
The trends for this year will be:
1. The use of different formats – Videos, carousels, live, etc.
2. Collaborations with influencers
3. E-commerce in social networks – The chance to sell and pay in the same platform.
9. Choose content types according to platforms
Here’s a list of content types you can create:
- Memes
- Hacks
- GIFs
- Infographics
- FAQS
- Checklists
- How-tos
- Polls
- Giveaways
- Contests
- User-generated content
- Photo
- Guide
- Live-streaming
- Audio
- Video
10. Brainstorm content ideas and develop publication schedules
Content is perhaps the most important element in a social media strategy. It is useful to have a list of ideas for creating content, such as the following:
- Do a survey
- Ask your followers
- Check out trending content
- Use a book title
- Use Buzzsumo
- Raise a question and answer it
- Read your blog comments
- Do a Google Search for popular keywords
- Visit Quora to find questions and answer them
- Check out the trending topics in your Twitter sidebar
- Do brainstorming
- Use content of competitors to your advantage.
- Read an industry magazine
- Type a keyword into Pinterest’s search box
- Share your achievement
- Find keyword suggestions with Ubersuggest
- Check out Events on Facebook
- What’s happening in the news
- Visit LinkedIn groups
- Behind the scene posts
- A photo
- Make a poll
- Write about your favorite products
- Ask the mood of the fans
- Fun facts
Once you come up with content ideas, it’s important to take advantage as much as you can and create as many pieces as you can.
Develop also a posting schedule:
- TikTok: 1-3 times per day
- Instagram: 1-2 times per day
- Facebook: 2-4 times per day
- LinkedIn: 1 time per day
- Twitter: 3-4 times per day
- Pinterest: 1 time per day
11. List the tools to be used
Scheduling your social media content will help you save your time.
Related Content: 30 Instagram Tools to Improve Your Marketing
12. Create content with call to action
Every piece of content you produce should end with a call-to-action (CTA).
A Call to Action is a phrase that’s used to tell the user exactly what action to take and how to take it. This can be as simple as two words or a sentence or two.
For instance: SPOTIFY’s Call to Action: Music you love. Free. Install now.
Related Content: 5 Elements of Effective Calls-to-Action
13. Optimize your content
You can optimize your content by checking:
- Hashtags
- Images
- Links
- Content
14. Use online advertising with successful content
Online advertising is the art of persuading the targeted customer with an online marketing message to perform a specific action, such as making a purchase.
Social media advertising is the second-largest digital advertisement market. It has many advantages:
- Point to very specific target audiences
- Use variety of ad formats
- Drive leads and sales
Related content: Online Advertising: Make Your Strategy Work
15. Engage with your audience
It’s crucial that you engage and answer to your audience on the social media platforms.
You can also create an account just for customer service.
16. Gather and analyze results and build a report
Use social media insights tools to compare your results to goals.
It’s useful to build a report and share it with your team.
17. Review and adjust your strategy
A social media strategy is not set in stone. It’s a very dynamic document where you revisit from time to time (usually annually) and help you adapt your strategy for the next period.
Conclusion
This step-by-step guide will help you create your social media strategy. It provides actionable steps that will transform your online presence, and ultimately, it will provide you successful results.