How To Create A Social Media Content Strategy That Gets Results
Social media content strategy is one area of marketing that most B2B professionals have a hard time getting right. But the good news is that the right content strategy can help your social media marketing go viral. We break down the five content strategy pillars that can help you drive success for your overall marketing plan.
Why is a social media content strategy important?
With so much information going online, social media is an important part of how audiences learn about your brand—beyond your products and services. Think of it as a virtual brand ambassador, which can help to increase brand awareness, loyalty, trust and engagement, alongside advertising your services.
A social media content strategy helps you plan out what to post on your social channels, as you decide how to keep your audiences engaged. The more relevant, interesting and engaging your content is, the more followers and likes you will likely receive. And this is especially the case for businesses that are trying to establish themselves on social media as credible and authoritative sources of information.
A good social media content strategy goes beyond simply posting updates and pictures. It should include thinking about what you want your audience to learn or think about your brand, as well as crafting each post in a way that encourages engagement (likes, shares and comments). This will help you create an engaged audience that is both supportive and evangelistic – two key ingredients for success on social media.
5 Pillars of a Successful Social Media Content Strategy
#1 Know Who Your Audiences Are
When creating social media content, it is important to first define who your audience is. This can be done by understanding your customer’s needs and wants, as well as what topics are popular with them.
Start by asking yourself the following:
Once you have a clear understanding of who your audience is and their user persona, you can begin to create content that meets their needs and interests, and for you to align with the actions you want them to take after seeing your content.
#2 Be Where You’re Valued
Ideally, the best thing for you to do is be on every social media platform, reaching out to your audiences at every point.
But this can be hard to achieve, and in fact, might be the downfall of your social media content strategy. Not all content needs to be shared everywhere, and not every social media platform has to be a priority.
You see, every social media channel thrives on different kinds of content types and audiences. For example, LinkedIn works best if you’re looking to reach out to a B2B crowd, with plenty of content focussing on jobs and professional news, whereas Instagram is more appealing to the younger crowd with attractive visual content.
So ask yourself the following as you perform a content audit across your social media platforms:
This will help you understand which platforms to add and remove as part of your plan. Of course, it’s not goodbye forever—you’re simply preventing yourself from spreading too thin. Once you’ve set a stable and consistent content strategy across your priority channels, you can always revisit your less active socials once again and decide how you’d like to proceed forward.
#3 Tailor Your Content
With the information in step 2, you should now know what platforms your business is performing well on, and the kind of content that works on the individual platform.
Now it’s time for you to allocate the kind of content you’d like to post on each different channel. As we mentioned before, it is important for you to differentiate your content according to the relevant social media network in order to maximise your strategy and stand out in the eyes of your audience. Simply put, adapting it to the social media platform’s standard makes it easier for your audiences to take in the information you want them to know.
This doesn’t mean that you have to post different content topics across all channels. The same blog post that you’re posting on Facebook can be reused on Instagram as a carousel post with the highlights. Both can have the intended impact, as long as it’s tailored to the social media platform.
Here are some recommendations on the content types you can make use of to step up your social media game.
#4 Designing a Set of Guidelines and Best Practices for Your Brand
Your brand has to have its own personality—through a strong visual identity, tone and voice.
Some things to consider would be:
Coming up with guidelines can help you and your team craft content that is consistent in engaging with your audience—not just with posts, but comments, reviews and negative sentiments as well.
#5 Post at Best Times
Now everything’s coming together. You’ve got your content planned out, your visuals and captions ready and in line with your brand…how do you know when to send them out?
Luckily, we’ve got some general guidelines for you to follow, applicable to all social media platforms:
Here’s the tricky part: these guidelines are just that—guidelines. It’s important for you to take a look at your analytics and draw your own observations on when your audiences are most active. Social media runs 24/7, and audience habits depend on plenty of factors, including time zones, industries and culture.
Bringing it all together…
While there isn’t a one-size-fits-all social media content strategy for success, these steps are a great starting point for you to develop a new approach and build a foundation. Planning and publishing your social media content is just one part of the strategy. A good social media content strategy requires plenty of observation, measurement and optimisation before you see success—and that comes with experience!
If you’re looking to take it a step further by building followership in engagement, why not engage a digital marketing agency like us to handle all your social media needs? With our experience and expertise in social media content strategy and marketing, we’ve helped many of our clients reach their digital marketing goals and find success online.
Reach out to us to find out more about how we can help you create a winning social media content strategy.
