Contact Sales
Social media marketing has had a revolutionary impact on the digital marketing industry. It helps brands connect with consumers on a more personal level, and it can be a powerful tool for amplifying visibility across the globe.
But planning a social media content strategy is far from simple.
There are many things to consider when creating a robust, sustainable strategy for social media content. If you’re feeling lost in the metaphorical woods of this highly-saturated digital marketing landscape, look no further. This article will outline everything you need to do to create one from start to finish.
The Importance A Good Content Strategy For Social Media
Having a strategy for the way you curate and upload content on social media is absolutely crucial to the performance of your various social media channels.
Without a strategy, using social media to connect with consumers can be a tricky and unproductive process. By identifying your goals and building up a system of tactics that incorporate storytelling and consumer-led content preferences, you can experience a range of essential benefits, such as:
- Increased website traffic
- Brand humanization
- Higher conversion rates
- Increased brand awareness and visibility
- Better customer reviews
- A deeper understanding of your audience
- Enable bigger campaigns
And that’s only a fraction of the positive effect that having a social media content strategy can deliver.
Bear in mind that a social media strategy is different from a social media content strategy. The former focuses on general growth, analytics, and engagement strategy. The latter focuses on the content itself and how you can leverage it to create a deeper relationship with customers.
How Does A Content Strategy For Social Media Differ From Other Platforms?
It’s important for brands to understand that all social media platforms have their own policies, content guidelines, and trends to take into account.
For example, Instagram is well-known as a visually-dominated platform. The highest-performing posts have high-resolution images and videos, while those with dense captions tend to perform lower. However, a text-focused platform like Twitter sees high text engagement rates.
Understanding the differences between these major social media platforms helps shape your content strategy into one that connects more contextually with consumers.
What Are Social Media Content Best Practices?
Even though different social media channels have their own unique take on content trends and guidelines, there are some umbrella tactics that can apply to most platforms. When it comes to creating a sound social media content strategy, take these best practices into account:
Conduct thorough ongoing market research
Familiarizing yourself with your target market is absolutely crucial for developing a high-performance content strategy. This isn’t a once-off endeavor. You need to keep tabs on it as trends change and consumer behavior shifts.
Choose your platforms wisely
It’s not always necessary to be equally active on all popular social media platforms at once. Determine which 2-4 you already have the most strength on and put your focus on uplifting those rather than seeing average growth on 4-5.
Use a content calendar
Content calendars, especially automation ones, can help you visualize the long-term performance and trajectory of your social media accounts. They also make it easier for employees across multiple departments to comprehend the progress at hand.
Create consistent brand guidelines
Your content should be both visually engaging and consistent. While some modification per platform is essential, you want consumers to see some cohesion both in individual feeds and across multiple social media channels.
Regularly audit engagement and performance
Every few weeks or months, bring your team together to perform a thorough debrief and review of progress. Use it to inform one another about what can be potentially changed or kept up in the future.
Following these best practices will help your company create a content strategy that is current and adaptable to the nature of social media. Set yourself up for success by following the template that so many other brands have used to accomplish their goals.
What To Consider When Building A Content Strategy For Social Media
Something that can make social media marketing quite challenging is the fact that it can change and evolve on a regular basis. Something that’s popular or trending one week may vanish into oblivion the next. This amplifies the need for an adaptable and somewhat cautious strategy for content.
1. Collaboration can boost visibility and performance
Across the board, collaboration has shown to be an effective way to market brands on social media. Creating content alongside other brands as a team or a particular promotional post is a great way to gain extra visibility and demonstrate your connection to other successful brands.
2. Leverage employee advocacy
Hot on the heels of collaboration with other brands and professionals is collaborating with your employees. Employee advocacy is a great way to promote your brand from the inside out, fostering trust and engagement. Having your team share content on their social media platforms is an excellent marketing channel that should be included in every content strategy.
3. Relevancy is important to consumers
Irrelevant content is the reason why 51% of consumers choose to unfollow a brand. Once you have a content pattern, don’t divert from it too much, or you may disappoint followers.
4. Consumers want to be engaged with, not at
A lot of businesses using social media to broadcast their brand utilize it as an extension of customer service. Plenty of consumers will use your various channels to express their happiness or displeasure with your brand, and they expect you to engage with them regardless.
5. Inauthenticity is obvious
We all know that authenticity is highly valued by consumers. But it’s important to recognize that authenticity can’t be forced. Don’t become so obsessed with the authenticity that your brand fails to acknowledge what its consumers want from your content stream.
6. Hire professional designers
When it comes to visually-oriented social media platforms, you can’t afford to have anyone but trained professionals assessing the quality and style of your content.
What Are The Steps In Creating A Social Media Content Strategy?
Now that we’ve gone through some of the basic ground rules surrounding the competitive world of social media content, let’s get down to the nitty-gritty. How do you create a strategy from scratch?
Building a successful social media content strategy takes time, skills, and extensive research. But with the right approach, any team of professionals can make it happen.
You can use these five basic steps as a guide:
Step 1: Identify and set clear goals
When starting the process of building any kind of strategy or project, setting the right goals is an essential first step. You can’t measure progress unless you develop clear metrics for what that progress will look like, so make sure you set KPIs and objectives for what your content strategy should achieve.
Are you looking to refine the visual appearance of your brand? Gain a bigger online following? Connect with a new market demographic? Know what your objectives are and let them guide you forward.
Step 2: Plan and prepare your content theme
Your social media content should have a clear theme and aesthetic. It should tie in consistently with your brand identity and act as a signifier for what it represents on a practical and symbolic level.
Elements like color, tone, and general artistic direction should be taken into account when curating a social media content strategy. This will aid with the visual cohesion of your profiles and make it easier for consumers to recognize and appreciate your content.
Step 3: Create and upload your content online
Once you have conceptualized the style and direction of your social media strategy, you need to work on creating some posts. Pretty much all successful brands will create a content planner or schedule to help organize current and future posts in a more streamlined and productive way.
Step 4: Track progress using KPIs
KPI stands for Key Performance Indicator. By the time you are already uploading content, your KPIs should already be set and ready to track once consumers start viewing and engaging with them.
Some popular KPIs to set involve the number of active engagements per post, shareability or virality rate, monthly growth metrics, and more. Progress tracking via the use of KPIs is an essential part of a solid social media content strategy that should be kept up continuously over time.
Step 5: Be adaptable and open to feedback
Once you have a good content cycle in motion, the only thing left is to remain adaptable to the inevitable whims and evolutions of social media platforms.
Use your channels as opportunities to keep learning more about your target market and the many different ways you can engage with them. Remember, social media strategies should be far from static – it’s a constantly evolving marketing sector that requires regular reviewing and modification.
Develop A World-Class Social Media Content Strategy With Clearview Social
It’s normal to feel slightly overwhelmed by the prospect of developing a great social media content strategy from the ground up. But the good news is, you don’t have to do it on your own.
Clearview Social is a platform that provides brands worldwide with the resources, guidelines, and strategy development needed to enhance social media practices across all platforms. With an employee advocacy-focused approach, you couldn’t be in better hands.
Ready to create a content media strategy that gets those clicks and skyrockets your engagement? Contact Clearview Social and book a demo today.