Many businesses find creating social media strategies overwhelming. There are so many channels available, and each platform constantly adds new features that you need to learn and integrate into your marketing plan.
If you don’t have a full-time team of social media experts, it’s even more difficult. But the fact is that your online success depends on a sensible and straightforward strategy that suits your resources and goals.
By the end of this guide, you’ll know how to develop a social media strategy to increase traffic and reduce that overwhelming feeling whenever you open Instagram or Twitter.
What is social media strategy?
A social media strategy is an outline of the content your business will post, the responsibilities of your social media team, and the social media channels you will use to promote your business. A social media strategy includes social media goals that complement your business’s overall digital marketing strategy.
Your social media strategy is your master plan for how you create, post, and engage with your social media content.
This includes your social content guidelines, posting cadence, social media marketing campaigns, target audience, etc. Engagement strategies that promote your business and brand.
Many companies use social media to connect with customers, provide support, advertise new products and features, and promote special offers.
See the State of Social Media in 2023: How You Can Build Community, Drive Sales, and Go Viral, According to 1,000+ Social Media Managers
Why do you need a social media strategy?
Developing a social media strategy can help you overcome these and other challenges. Social media strategies enable you to set goals and guardrails, track performance, and make changes to your benchmarks over time.
Without a starting point, you can’t measure what’s working and how to shift your activity to achieve your goals.
A social media strategy helps you set expectations for team-wide participation and get everyone to agree on what they should and shouldn’t do on your social networks.
How to create a social media strategy
- Define your target audience.
- Include ecommerce.
- Optimize your social channels for search.
- Focus on some major channels.
- Make a plan for customer service.
- Develop a recipe card to guide you.
- Measure your results.
- Adjust your strategy.
Let’s learn how to start building a social media strategy from scratch.
How to Create a Social Media Strategy from Scratch
1. Define your target audience.
If you have not already identified and documented yourself Buyer personas Start by defining the key demographics of the audience you’re trying to reach, such as age, gender, occupation, income, hobbies, and interests.
Defining your target audience helps you create focused advertising that addresses the specific needs of your ideal consumer.
For example, the sponsored tweet below by monday.com, a project management platform, highlights the platform’s flexibility and workflow customization feature.
The tweet targets business owners and project managers who may feel limited by other project management software.
Consider the challenges of your ideal consumer and what problems they are solving every day. Focus on no more than four types of people that represent the majority of your buyers. Don’t get hung up on exceptions or outliers, otherwise you’ll never be able to start!
Once you start creating content for your audience, focus on engaging your audience at every level.
Pay close attention to any questions or comments posted by your audience and address them immediately, as this engagement can make or break a conversion or purchase.
When consumers are on your social media pages they feel like they are part of a community. In fact, 1 in 5 social media users joined or participated in an online community in the past three months.
2. Incorporate ecommerce.
As more and more people use social media to discover new products, they are also finding it convenient to purchase those products directly from the social app where they found them.
80% of social media marketers have found that consumers more often purchase products directly within social apps than through brand websites or third-party resellers.
Translation? If you sell products, social media should be a key part of your ecommerce strategy in 2023.
Most platforms offer built-in eCommerce features like shoppable posts, and 47% of social media marketers are already taking advantage of selling products directly within social media apps.
If you need inspiration to incorporate ecommerce into your social strategy, take inspiration from Sephora.
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Whenever a beauty brand shares an image of a product, they use a product tag that links to its shoppable page above.
This makes it easy for its followers to instantly purchase anything they see on the page without leaving the app.
A key element of selling successfully on social media is establishing brand trust so that users feel comfortable purchasing your products directly on the app.
While Sephora has built an established brand reputation over time, you can build trust in other ways, even if you’re building your social media strategy from scratch.
Focus on sharing customer reviews and testimonials, user-generated content (UGC), and product data to build social proof.
3. Optimize your social channels for search.
Social search is on the rise.
As more people turn to social media with their queries instead of search engines, 89% of social media marketers agree that social search is important to their overall social media strategies in 2023.
Nearly 24% of consumers aged 18-54 use social media first to discover brands.
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For marketers, this insight means that your social channels must be optimized for search. Make social SEO a priority if you want your social channels to show up in results when your audience searches for your brand.
Similar to optimizing for search engines like Google, there are a few ways you can optimize your social presence:
- Include relevant keywords and hashtags in your posts and bio.
- Make sure your username is easy to find.
- Keep your username the same across all accounts.
4. Focus on a few key social channels.
Most small businesses or social teams don’t have the bandwidth to set up and maintain a quality social media presence on every single channel.
Learning the rules for engaging on multiple networks at once is also overwhelming.
Focus on the channels that will bring the highest ROI. For most brands, this will be Instagram.
Instagram is proven to be the best source of ROI, engagement, and quality leads. Additionally, 23% of marketers believe Instagram offers the most potential for brands to grow their audiences in 2023.
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If you want to build a strong social media strategy from the beginning, start small. Research the major networks to find out where your target audience is spending time.
For example, if your ideal consumers are business professionals, it may be beneficial to post on LinkedIn instead of Instagram.
Focus your efforts on building, nurturing, and maintaining a community on the social channels where your target audience spends most of their time before moving to another channel.
5. Make a plan for customer service.
When creating your social media strategy, consider how you will use your channels for customer service.
Social media has become so ingrained in our everyday lives that it’s no surprise that people turn to these platforms for everything from brand discovery to customer service.
According to our State of Social Media in 2023 report, 1 in 5 social media users have contacted a brand via DM for customer service in the last three months.
Whether you create a separate account dedicated to customer service or set up an auto-reply when people DM you on Instagram, make a plan for how you’ll handle customer support via social media.
6. Develop a recipe card to guide you.
Social media is not an exact science. It doesn’t work the same for every business or industry.
To see the results of your business, create a recipe card. Recipe cards are a posting and engagement schedule that keeps your team on track and helps you post content consistently.
HubSpot has a list of social media tools and templates that you can use to plan your content and create a posting schedule.
Develop a proper recipe card that you can stick to and get your team to follow. Set goals for your posting and engagement frequency, and hold yourself accountable for following your prescription.
7. Measure your results.
There are countless things to track on your social media channels. Start by looking at how much traffic your social accounts drive to your website or blog.
Social media platforms provide tools to help businesses track analytics.
For example, you can use Facebook’s Page Insights, Instagram‘s Account Insights, and LinkedIn’s Visitor Analytics to see what people are responding to and look for trends related to the topics or keywords that are most relevant. Create interest.
Once you have an idea of your average traffic and post performance, set goals for key metrics and keep a scorecard to measure your progress.
Be sure to choose metrics that are easy to collect because if it takes a lot of time to track, you won’t be motivated to do it.
Examples of simple metrics include the total number of interactions, traffic to your website, and sales or revenue that can be attributed to social.
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8. Adjust your strategy.
Social media will not start working overnight.
It takes time to establish a following, stabilize your brand, and see results from your efforts. So experiment to find the right combination of channel, content and messaging that works for your audience.
Track changes in your post views, audience demographics, and post interactions and make changes as needed.
Over time, you’ll be able to adjust your recipe cards, ingredients, and personality based on the information you’re gathering, which will help you fine-tune your strategy and generate more consistent results.
Editor’s note: This post was originally published in February 2016 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.
