A social media strategy is a comprehensive plan that outlines your social media goals, the actions you take to achieve those goals, and the chosen metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the success of your strategy. Having a solid social media strategy in place provides you and your team with a clear direction for all your social media activities, so understanding how to craft one is crucial.
Understanding the Importance of a Social Media Strategy
Creating a comprehensive social media strategy can provide you with valuable data and insights to help you produce compelling content that truly resonates with your audience. As well as providing you with a clear direction for your social media efforts, a well-thought-out social strategy can help you refine your target audiences, generate higher-quality leads, enhance brand awareness, increase website traffic, and more.
Without a robust social media strategy in place with defined goals and objectives, how else will you be able to successfully monitor performance and establish essential benchmarks?
Key Components of a Successful Social Media Plan
There are plenty of elements to consider when creating a successful social media plan, from defining clear goals and analysing competitors to choosing the right platforms and monitoring the most meaningful metrics. Without further ado, here are some steps you should take to forge a solid strategy that will elevate your social media marketing efforts and produce tangible results.
Conduct a Social Audit
Conducting a social media audit to analyse your current social media marketing efforts can help shape your social strategy. Performing a social audit can help unveil valuable insights including best and worst-performing content, a sentiment overview, follower fluctuation, and more. It will also provide you with a comprehensive analysis of key performance metrics such as engagement rate, impressions, comments, likes, and shares, to help you define your social strategy.
Research Your Audience
Getting to know the wants and needs of your customers as well as the challenges and problems they face will help shape your strategy.
Start by gathering real-world data from your website (eg. Google Analytics) and social analytics to provide you with audience insights including their age, gender, location, language, interests, and more. You can also utilise third-party social listening tools to help you discover how customers and followers feel about your brand. Consider conducting market research such as online surveys or interviewing your customers and analysing any commonly asked questions your customers post.
These insights will help you build customer personas to help you better understand who your ideal customer is, their pain points, how they make decisions, and how your product or service can solve their problem(s).
Analyse Your Competitors
Once you’ve got a solid understanding of who your audience is and how to engage with them, it’s time to turn your attention to the competition. Gather a list of your competitors and conduct an in-depth analysis to unveil valuable insights into their social media activity. For example, a social media competitive analysis can reveal what content is performing (and what’s not), and which social platforms work best for them and which don’t. These learnings and insights will help you discover opportunities and define your social strategy.
Set Goals and Objectives
This is a big one! Any fully-fledged social media strategy should revolve around achieving particular goals and objectives. Whether your aim is to boost brand awareness, drive traffic to your website, increase the number of followers, generate quality leads, or a combination of the above, setting clear goals and objectives for your social campaigns is crucial to measuring success.
Plan and Schedule Content
Timing is crucial when it comes to publishing social content. Post too little and you risk losing followers because you’re not providing value, but if you post too much you could risk overwhelming your followers.
With a plethora of platforms catering to different audiences, the best time to post can vary. A recent analysis found that Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays are the best days to post on social media while Sundays are the worst. While this can give brands and marketers great insight, there is still no ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach when it comes to posting on platforms.
We do know, however, that consistency is key. Publishing a beautiful variety of compelling content several times a week on different social platforms can help keep your audience engaged and attract new followers.
Generating content for each social network can be challenging, so be sure to utilise your content creation efforts by cross-promoting it across platforms. This will also help inform your followers that you’re present on other social media channels. Repurposing content across platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, can help drive traffic to your other social profiles to increase your overall visibility.
As well as using the platform’s own scheduling tools, there is an array of third-party tools specifically designed to manage your social scheduling needs. So rather than spend a lot of time and energy posting content in real-time, stay on top of your social strategy by creating a detailed social content calendar and scheduling all posts.
Analyse and Measure Performance
As part of your social strategy, it’s essential to carefully monitor performance by tracking meaningful metrics. From valuable engagement metrics such as likes, comments, reactions, and shares to click-through rate (CTR) and conversion rate (CVR), there are plenty of metrics to consider. Just make sure to analyse the right metrics in line with your goals. For example, if you’re looking to drive traffic to your website, a very valuable metric to measure would be CTR. To find these metrics, leverage native social media analytics tools, Google Analytics, and third-party social media management platforms.
Adapt and Evolve Your Strategy
Once you have enough reliable data to analyse the success of your social media strategy, don’t be afraid to adapt, enhance, and evolve it. By gathering the insights mentioned above, you should be able to identify what worked well and what didn’t. For example, the data might reveal that videos on Facebook received twice as much engagement as Instagram reels. Going forward then, you might choose to focus your efforts on Facebook video content and choose a different direction for Instagram. Monitoring performance and analysing metrics regularly can provide you with valuable insights to help enhance and evolve your social strategy.
Case Study: An Effective Social Media Strategy in Action
At Social Chameleon, we’re experts in all things social strategy! As a testament to this, we recently developed and managed a robust TikTok strategy for a global tyre manufacturer. The objective was to position the brand as a key part of the agri and industrial community. Firstly, we identified a large and engaged community of agricultural users using high-volume hashtags such as ‘Farmtok. We then analysed competitors and saw a need for more fun and relatable content for those within the agri and industrial communities.
Combining relatable content, relevant trends, and challenges, we increased the brand’s followers by 383%, bolstered total likes and comments by 3057% and 412% respectively, and generated an uplift of 795% for video views. Looking to elevate your social media strategy? Drop us a line!
