A simple guide to social media content strategy

Social media content strategy is a type of marketing strategy on social media. It takes into account the specifics of different channels and encompasses planning, creating, and distributing content across social media.

In this article, we'll look into what it takes to create a robust social media content strategy for your brand.

Depending on how old your business is, you might have several accounts. For example, one on Twitter, another on Instagram, and so on. Sometimes if you have several brands or products, you need to manage multiple accounts on the same platform. If you're a startup, you might only be thinking about your strategy and what channels you want to have.

In any case, before sitting down and planning your content, make sure that you understand what makes every channel unique. For example, Instagram and TikTok are very video-heavy and they mostly rely on short-form videos. Despite the growing popularity of Shorts, YouTube is the hub for long-form videos. Twitter and LinkedIn are more leaning towards text formats.

If you know what type of posts work on which channel, it'll be easier for you to plan.

The social media world might seem chaotic but you can structure it by making sure that any marketing efforts are aligned with your overall business strategy. For this, you'll need to set some time aside and define your goals.

Ideally, you'd want to have different goals for different channels. For LinkedIn, you might want to grow the number of comments and boost your engagement rates while for YouTube you might aim at growing the number of average views per video.

For every goal, there should be a relevant key performance indicator (KPI). For example, if your goal is to increase brand awareness on social media, then your content KPIs should measure your efforts toward this goal, be it impressions or the number of views of your video.

Social media channels might have different content types but you need to take into account what your audience wants. Most channels give creators enough flexibility to post content that suits their needs. For example, even if Twitter is mostly for short text posts, you can still publish a video there.

This means that before planning your strategy, you need to find out what works for your audience. Do they like memes and quotes? Or do book recommendations and carousels perform better?

Your strategy should be flexible enough to accommodate the trial-and-error approach. Leave some room for experimentation and making tweaks to your content.

The social media world is dynamic. So should be your strategy. It doesn't have to be something set in stone. Social media posts perform well some days but sometimes even good content goes unnoticed. It all comes down to how well you know and understand social media algorithms and use them to your own advantage.

Being adaptable and flexible is one of the most important skills on social media. Trends move so fast and historical events happen almost every day. This makes it highly possible that your strategy might become obsolete in just a few months, if not weeks, after you finalize it. Make sure that you keep an open mind about your social media content and adapt it regularly.

It's hard to create a content plan for the whole year. This means that your strategy should outline only a general approach to each social media channel and what you want to achieve there. When it comes to planning your content in more detail, you can plan per month or quarter.

For example, you can decide how many posts you'll aim to publish or what holidays and events you want to highlight. Do you want to show your HR brand or do you prefer to focus on your product only? These are all general questions that should be answered in your strategy which, in turn, will dictate your content plan.

Posting great and timely content on social media is only part of the job. You need to track how this content is performing. By consistently paying attention to metrics, you can see how your audience reacts to a particular type of content and if your plan needs a bit of tweaking.

Modern social media analytics tools allow brands to track and measure lots of metrics. In reality, you don't need all of them. Otherwise, it'll easily become overwhelming. Most of the metrics are not important for tracking how effective a campaign or a post is for meeting your goals.

Your social media plan should include different ways of delivering content to your community. Relying solely on organic reach is enough if you're in a competitive industry. Paid posts can boost your efforts and yield good results if you spend some time fine-tuning your targeting.

You can also try partnering with influencers who have access to your relevant target audience. By collaborating with an influencer, you can create your social media strategy to the next level.

Social media is a powerful tool for not only getting your message across but also engaging with your community. Depending on how big your account is, you might have thousands of followers or maybe a few dozen.

In any case, don't underestimate the power of word-of-mouth marketing. Try posting engaging content that involves asking questions and receiving responses from your audience. It can be something as simple as engaging in the comments section. The magic part of user-generated content is that it doesn't have to involve only your followers but can help reach a much wider audience.