What Goes In a Social Media Strategy?
Having a social media strategy out of your head, onto paper, is crucial to your success.
What is a Social Media Strategy?
We know you’ve heard of it, and you probably know you need one. Often, people don’t know exactly what goes in one or why having a clearly defined strategy and reason for being on social media is so important. You likely have a lot of the pieces floating around in your head. You have a general sense of what you should be doing, what you want from social media, or even who your audience is. However, we often get clients who come to us saying that social media isn’t “working” for them. the problem is that they never used a social media strategy to define success from the get-go!
If you haven’t defined objectives and you haven’t predetermined what “working” means, then how do you know if it’s really not working or not？
A social media strategy should be a living, breathing document. It’s something that should change and update as you actually execute the strategy. As you learn new things about your audience and about the social media platforms as they change, these things should influence your strategy.
There is a tension that exists between how your strategy should be fairly static because you have defined goals and objectives, but it also should be flexible enough to update and change as you learn new things so you will continue to get results.
Here are the sections that we put in a social media strategy when we're creating them for clients.
Key Components of a Social Media Strategy
Goals
We love to start with goals because we think that it is the thing that people miss the most. They don’t know what they want out of their social media and they often don’t know what they expect it to do for them.
When we set goals, we are making broad statements about the purpose of being on social media and how we want it to support overall business objectives.
Our goals are NOT things like, “Get 10,000 Instagram followers by the end of the year.” Specific objectives like this ARE important and we should set micro-goals like this as we implement the strategy, but this isn’t the purpose of this section.
Instead, we use things like:
Increasing brand awareness
Building an audience to sell a future book to (or to secure a writing contract)
Generate leads for the business.
Now we know what we want and as we evaluate whether things are working or not, we can look back at these goals and ask ourselves, “Is this serving my purpose of XYZ?”
Audience
Most business owners have a good basic understanding of their audience, primarily their demographics. They might know things like gender, family structure, location, education, etc. But what makes an audience avatar powerful is having their psychographic information. We look at motivations goals, conflicts, aspirations, objections to sale, etc. We want to know what that person wants on a behavioural and emotional level, because that is how we truly make purchase decisions.
We use a combination of analytics, data sources and surveys to improve this section.
Competitors
The next section of a social media strategy is an analysis of your main competitors. We think most people spend a ridiculous amount of unnecessary time on this section. People like to slice and dice data about their competitors to a very granular level to know that they are posting every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 10:00 AM.
Here at DIFY, we take a very different approach to competitor research. We don’t think those things are that helpful because that’s what algorithms are for! Algorithms are for making sure your content reaches the right people. We don’t need to slice and dice our competitor’s activities at that level.
What we're looking for here is stuff like: what platforms are they on? How engaged is their audience? What type of content are they posting?
We make general observations about what is working for them. Are their Reels getting views? Are their posts getting liked or shared? When we look at a competitor, we can’t always assume that it will be right for you and your business because they are doing something. Competitor info needs to be taken with a grain of salt.
SEO & Keywords
As you build your online presence, your potential customers are out there searching for solutions. You want to show up when they do! Even though keywords are a little more SEO-y, we think they are crucial to understanding how people search and discover online.
Keywords should influence everything you create for social media. They should inform your hashtag strategy, video titles, headlines… everything!
It’s fundamental for clients to understand what a keyword is and what role they play and have basic SEO knowledge.
Long Form Content
Every social media strategy needs a long-form content strategy. If you want to build a robust online presence you need a blog, podcast, or video blog (vlog). The hard truth is that something like 60-70% of website traffic still comes from search.
Website traffic is critical to an online business because it is your storefront!
Social Media Content Strategy
We’ve already talked about keywords and we’ve spoken about long-form content. Here, we want to discuss specific types of content to create for social media. Here we’ll offer a lot of different inspirational ideas and the types of content that I think will work well for them.
You also want to consider what you are comfortable with. Hate video? We hope you can move past this because video is here to stay! But, maybe you are a poor writer. We wouldn’t recommend text-heavy content! Maybe video or audio stuff is a better fit for you!
Platforms
This last main section is what platforms that business should be on. The platforms you choose to be on should have a lot to do with what your goals are and who your audience is! You might like TikTok, or prefer Instagram, or maybe you check Facebook 20 times a day. But if your audience isn’t there and it doesn’t serve your goals, it’s just not where you should be.
List Building
Finally, with a social media strategy, we include a little section on email list building. If you are going to take the time to be on social media, we think it’s really important to make sure that you capture as much of the audience as you can on an email list.
Social media platforms are changing all the time, algorithms change, reach changes and people lose their accounts. As a business owner, your audience is one of your greatest assets. These are your potential future customers, right? They represent your business’ future!
It’s really important to get your audience on an email list.
There you have it. This is everything that goes into a social media strategy! A well-defined social media strategy is essential for achieving business goals and effectively engaging with the audience. It provides a clear roadmap, allowing businesses to adapt and refine their approach over time, ensuring sustained success on social media platforms when times are tough!
Need an extra hand for your social media? Do not hesitate to reach out to us at enquiries@dify.sg today!