Social media is everywhere. Most of us use social media daily for a variety of purposes such as entertainment, news consumption and socialization.
Over the last two decades, it has emerged as one of the primary marketing channels for organizations. With more than half of the world’s population on social media channels, it is crucial for businesses to have an effective social media content strategy to be able to reach the intended audience.
But building a robust social media strategy will depend on a lot of factors such as the social media management tools you are using, the paid advertising tactics you opt for and so on.
This article sheds light on not just the steps in creating a social media content strategy but also, its importance for businesses and organizations.
Let’s delve deeper.
Table of Contents
What Is a Social Media Content Strategy?
Social media content strategy is the process of planning, creating, and implementing various types of content on different social media platforms.
A documented content strategy is indispensable for an organization’s social media marketing initiatives to be successful. Also, social media is itself one of the most effective platforms for posting content online in order to capture the attention of your audience.
Many B2C and B2B businesses don’t have a documented content marketing strategy, which is why their presence on the social media channels turns out to be of little value.
How To Plan Social Media Content in 5 Steps?
- Step #1: Understand You Need a Solid Custom Plan Fit For You
- Step #2: Establish Achievable and Measurable Goals
- Step #3: Research Your Audience
- Step #4: Establish the Vital Metrics and KPIs
- Step #5: Create the Content
Let’s go directly into the steps in creating an ideal social media content plan.
Step #1: Understand You Need a Solid Custom Plan Fit For You
As the first step of the process, it is important to have a strategy that caters solely to your brand and your business’ requirements. When it comes to strategies, there is no one-size-fits-all approach. Small-scale and large-scale brands have different strategies of their own targeting smaller and larger goals and objectives.
Step #2: Establish Achievable and Measurable Goals
Every social media content strategy should start with goal setting. Goals are effective ways of identifying what you want to achieve within a specific period. The following are some of the vital questions to ask in the goal setting process:
Do you want to increase your brand awareness? This is the process of fostering familiarity between your product and the social media users. This is a common goal for marketers that are about to announce a new product or simply make their presence known on the market.
Do you want to boost your engagement? Boosting engagement should be your priority if you are getting less likes or traction than before. Creating interactive content is a solution in this regard.
Do you want to drive traffic to the site? This is possible through social media ads, and you can use them efficiently to track and target your audience.
Step #3: Research Your Audience
Brands often rely on instincts and assumptions about their audience and that is often the biggest mistake they make. Marketing and unreasonable assumptions cannot go together. Researching the audience is a vital step in creating a robust social media content strategy.
There are numerous tools and statistics available online that can help you analyze a specific social media platform and get a sea of demographic data in very little time.
For instance, if you find that your Facebook users click on an average of 10 ads per month and women click more on these ads than men, you might plan to run particular ads for women to decide if this benefits your brand.
Step #4: Establish the Vital Metrics and KPIs
KPIs and metrics you set are crucial for knowing how well the social media strategy is performing. They are necessary to let you know if you are achieving the right goals. Some of these metrics are:
- Engagement: This is the interaction between your audience and content.
- Clicks: The number of times consumers have clicked on your content.
- Reach: The number of unique users who have seen the post on your feed.
- Hashtag Performance: This will help you determine the hashtags relating to your brand, most used by the audience.
Being able to identify the metrics that are most important for you enables you to keep track of your social media content’s effectiveness.
Step #5: Create the Content
This is what the previous steps led up to. Content is the king of your social media strategy. Some of the types of content that has been proven to promise results are:
- Short-Form Videos: Short-form videos work really well at a time when video consumption across all ages has increased but the average consumer’s attention span has reduced. Videos are extremely effective ways of boosting engagement.
- Stories: Presently, 500 million users use Stories every day. Therefore, including them in your strategy is a must. Create interactive stories by asking questions and see your engagement grow exponentially.
Coming up with a content theme is a plan that enables you to decide what to post in the long run. A central theme or topic is the standard for a month and you can build the content around it without running out of topics. Having a content theme makes it possible to come up with new content timely and effectively. You can also incorporate influencer marketing into your strategy to further increase the reach and effectiveness of your content.
Why Do You Need a Social Media Content Plan?
If you are still wondering why you need a social media content plan, here are a few reasons to consider:
It Saves Time
Some marketers mistakenly assume that preparing a detailed strategy means spending a lot of time. But in reality, not having a social media content calendar is more costly in the long run because at some point, you are at a loss of what to post next.
There is also an opportunity cost gone into posting randomly without a methodology to follow. A well-delineated strategy saves time and moves you towards your goals.
It Supports Business Objectives
When you are in the process of planning social media content, you automatically understand the target customer as a key part of the content strategy. Knowing them and the platforms they use are secrets that ultimately turn social media into a revenue generating machine.
As the strategy focuses on your end customer, it ends up driving ROI for, especially, ecommerce businesses.
It Provides Measurable Results
Social media reporting or social monitoring is a significant part but also a pain point for many marketers. There is no particular way of knowing whether you are achieving your goals.
But with a robust social media content strategy, it is easy to define most of the important metrics, including those that confirm if the strategy is paying off. Ecommerce marketers also get a way to prove which topics and formats are doing the best so that they can create more of those.
3 Best Examples of Content Strategy for Social Media Marketing
Looking at some of the world’s well-known brands leveraging social media with excellent content strategies is a useful study. Here are some that excel in that regard.
1. Gillette
The men’s skincare and grooming brand showed that a social media content strategy is not always about marketing a product. In 2019, they came up with the YouTube advertisement video, ‘The Best Men Can Be’.
The ad brought forth cases of men questioning and struggling with the conventional concept of masculinity. It acknowledged that every man is not the same and that men should hold each other responsible for setting good examples for the next generation.
The brand took advantage of the #metoo movement and sent a thought-provoking message to the society. The video was extremely successful with over 30 million users.
2. Apple: #ShotOniPhone
Apple had introduced the #ShotOniPhone as part of one of its social media campaigns and since then, it has become a major part of all the Apple iPhone launches.
The hashtag is used to discuss camera features, improvements, and different functions of the camera app while also encouraging the customers to add more content across the different platforms. Apple successfully used content to achieve long-term solid results with minimal effort.
3. Loot Crate
Look Crate does an amazing job with its social media content strategy by knowing who exactly the audience is. It is a subscription service that sends a box to you. Even with its apparently scattered Instagram feed, the customer targeting is on point.
This is probably the first and the most important thing that one needs to get right when launching a social media content strategy and the brand does it right.
Social Media Content Strategy Takeaway
Building a social media content strategy for your business is an immensely valuable and at the same time, daunting task. This guide can help you fill up the content calendar for months to come.
With good content on your social media platforms as well as the alternative social media channels, customer engagement increases and with that; increases the ROI of your business.
Social Media Content Strategy FAQ
1. What are the key elements of social media content strategy?
Key elements of social media content strategy are the following:
- Tailoring a custom content plan aligned with your goals
- Establishing achievable and measurable goals
- Researching the target audience you’ll be catering your content to
- Establishing the vital metrics and KPIs to track your progress
- Creating the content
