If you work in social media, then I’m sure you agree with me on this point: Just posting to post is not a social media strategy.
Where are the goals and key performance indicators (KPIs)? Who is the target audience and where do they spend time on social? What are you posting about and what value does it bring to your audience?
If a business wants to use social media to its full potential (which could mean huge brand growth), then they need to know who they want to reach, what kind of content they’re posting, where they’ll have a social presence, when they’ll publish, and how they’ll measure success.
Knowing you need a strategy is one thing — actually getting one on paper that you can wrap your head around and present to stakeholders is a whole other thing. This guide will make your strategy development 10x easier by chunking it up into 10 digestible steps. Let’s get started.
What is a social media strategy?
A social media strategy is a document that outlines your overall social media presence: the goals you have set for social media marketing, the platforms you plan to use, the people you’re trying to reach, and the types of content that will work best for your needs — along with other important information.
Social media strategy vs. social media plan
A social media strategy is, for lack of a better word, more strategic than a social media plan.
A social media plan focuses on content planning, like your content calendar, publishing cadence, and content ideas. A social media strategy is all-encompassing. It places a social media plan inside of a framework that also defines your audience, your competitive angle, your KPIs, and more.
You can get by with just a social media plan, but having a full-scale strategy can help you see even more success.
Why do you need a social media strategy?
Putting together a social media strategy takes a lot of time and effort, so it’s important to understand why you need to actually invest said time and effort.
Let’s walk you through a few reasons why having a strategy is key:
- It aligns your social media presence with larger marketing and business goals. For example, if you’re hoping to use social media to generate sales, you can incorporate social commerce and related content into your strategy.
- It defines what, when, and where you post, so you’re not wasting time. Define your content’s overall themes and figure out how to emotionally connect with your audience.
- It shows how to measure performance and gauge success, so you can continue to grow. Knowing your goals and which KPIs to track can help you make sense of the muddled world of social media ROI.
- It keeps everyone on your team organized and on the same page. When you have a documented strategy, you can make sure everyone knows what to do, even when you bring on new hires.
- It helps you explain to higher ups and stakeholders what you’re doing on social media. Strategies help you better sell social media to your boss, the C-suite, and other higher ups.
How to create a social media strategy
Let’s start with a quick primer. Watch our five-minute video that covers the key components of any social media strategy, regardless of your business size, team size, or industry.
Now let’s dive into the 10-step social media strategy. Each section of this article summarizes a key step in the process so you can understand exactly how to form your strategy and get it packaged for approval. If you need to learn more about any step, we've included links to some of our topic deep dives throughout.
- Step 1: Take stock with a social media audit
- Step 2: Define your social media goals
- Step 3: Define your key performance indicators (KPIs)
- Step 4: Identify your target audience
- Step 5: Research your competitors
- Step 6: Choose your social media platforms
- Step 7: Build a social media content calendar
- Step 8: Allocate resources and budget
- Step 9: Document your strategy
- Step 10: Set up workflows to implement your strategy
Step 1: Take stock with a social media audit
If you’re starting your social media presence from scratch, skip to step two.
The very first thing you need to do is conduct a social media audit. This is an analysis of your existing social presence and can be a guiding point for your new strategy. Whether you’re creating a strategy for the first time or changing up an existing strategy, your team should start with an audit to get an understanding of what’s already in place, what’s working, and what needs to be improved.
Start by getting prepared. This means gathering your social media logins and access to any tools you use so that you can get a birds’ eye view of the content your brand has been publishing and how it has been performing. Create a spreadsheet to help you compile all relevant information as part of your audit, making it easier to analyze.
If you had previously set goals and KPIs, make a note of those so that you can analyze whether or not you’ve hit them. If not, you’ll want to analyze your general performance, then follow Step 2 and Step 3 where we set goals and KPIs in this guide. Then you can apply these to your audit retrospectively.
Then, you simply need to look through your social media analytics and input the data into your spreadsheet for analysis. Each major social media platform comes with its own built-in analytics, but you can also take advantage of a tool like Loomly to get all of your social media performance data within a single dashboard.
For a more detailed step-by-step process, check out our five-day social media audit method. In our experience, it’s better to do a little bit every day across a typical work week.
Step 2: Define your social media goals
The next step to crafting an effective social media strategy is identifying your goals. Social media goals trickle down from your business’s overall goals. What are you hoping to accomplish as a business this year, and how can social media help you accomplish that? For example, if you’re building a new brand, your overall goal might be increasing brand awareness and your social media goal might be increasing views and landing X number of new followers.
You’re probably targeting more than one business goal, which means you’ll have more than one social media goal. Additionally, one business goal might inspire several social media goals. It’s best to separate out each goal so you can track them independently with targeted KPIs.
- Some common social media goals include:
- Increasing brand awareness
- Growing online audience
- Increasing website traffic
- Providing customer service
- Gaining audience and market insights
- Increasing community engagement
- Generating new leads
- Improving conversion rates
- Elevating brand perception
- Managing brand reputation
- Promoting events, products, services, etc.
Once you know what you’re hoping to achieve, you can more easily identify which social media metrics to track — more on that next!
Step 3: Define your key performance indicators (KPIs)
This step is about choosing the key performance indicators (KPIs) that will help you track progress toward your goals. Common social media KPIs include follower growth, reach, impressions, views, engagement rate, watch time, and link clicks.
You should choose KPIs that are 1. quantifiable, and 2. correspond directly to your social media goals so that you can track your performance and report on how close you are to achieving your goals.
Here’s a table showcasing which goals pertain to which KPIs, so you know which ones to prioritize.
We've listed out the KPIs for the most popular social media goals, as well as common KPIs for each social media platform, in our guide to social media KPIs.
Step 4: Identify your target audience
Clearly defining your target audience helps you choose the right platforms, create relevant content, and optimize your success. The more specific you are, the faster you'll grow within your niche, as algorithms can show your content to the right people.
To identify your target audience, put together a customer persona including details like:
- Demographics: Age, gender, education level, location
- Psychographics: Lifestyle, values, interests
- Customer behavior: Needs, purchasing behavior, buying patterns, brand loyalty
- Pain points: Reasons they’d need a product/service like yours
You can find this information through social listening, surveys, focus groups, interviews, and ad targeting suggestions in the various platforms.
Your customer persona becomes a living document of exactly who you need to be speaking to through your marketing messaging. This makes it easier to come up with content ideas, craft copy and creative, and speak to their exact needs.
Step 5: Research your competitors
Analyzing your competitors' social media activity provides insights into what works and what doesn't. This is an especially important step if you didn’t previously have a strategy in place during your audit. Competitor data can be just as important.
During this step, you’ll want to identify the platforms they use, the content formats they use and any major content themes you can identify, and what resonates with their audience (which you can identify via visible engagement metrics). By reviewing comments, you can also uncover common pain points, FAQs, and opportunities to better serve your audience.
Put together a benchmarking analysis as well so you can see how you line up with your competitors. You can do this in a spreadsheet by listing out data like:
- Top performing post types and formats
- Platforms with the highest engagement
- Follower count
- Average engagement
You’ll also want to pay attention to how your current social media presence compares to your competitors. Do you have more or fewer followers? More or less engagement? Do you share similar types of posts? What can you do to improve your performance? This will help you identify gaps — platforms, post types, content formats, etc. that your competitors aren't using but that your target audience is interested in.
Step 6: Choose your social media platforms
Next, you need to select the social media platforms that will be best for your business. Here’s how to hone in on the right platforms:
- Look at what your competitors are using: Are there certain platforms that all of your competitors appear to use? Those might align well with your audience.
- Evaluate platform demographics: Compare the demographics of major platforms to your target audience to make sure they align.
- Consider your industry: Which platforms are most relevant? Visual and ecommerce businesses may gravitate towards platforms like Instagram and Pinterest while B2B companies can benefit directly from LinkedIn.
- Assess content formats on each platform: Identify the content types that perform best on each platform (i.e., short videos on TikTok, image posts on Instagram) and determine which formats make the most sense for your business and content ideas.
- Focus on quality over quantity: You don’t need to be on every platform. Choose fewer platforms for better engagement versus trying to have a presence on all platforms. This will also allow you to tailor content for each platform instead of repurposing everything universally.
While there are many overlapping qualities between platforms, each one is particularly strong for a particular use case. Here's a brief look at what those are for the major social media platforms.
Once you’ve pinpointed the best platforms for your business, get started creating your accounts if you haven’t yet. If you’ve been using a platform that you’ve determined may not be worth it, stop wasting your time. You can always create and pin a post that leads visitors to your active social media accounts.
Step 7: Build a social media content calendar
After selecting your social media platforms, it’s time to start thinking about your content. Building out a social media calendar means you need to consider what types of content make sense for your brand as well as what types of content will resonate with your audience.
More than that, you also want to consider the "why" behind your content. To ensure your content connects with your audience, you want your posts to have at least one of the following purposes behind them:
- Educate: Teach your audience about your business, product, and/or industry.
- Entertain: Engage your audience with fun and delightful content.
- Inspire: Create content that inspires your audience to take action.
- Relate: Share content that your audience can easily relate to.
Then, consider the different types of social media posts you can create. These include photos, graphics and infographics, short-form videos, user-generated content, testimonials and reviews, tips and how-tos, product demos, trends, promotions, and more.
Consider what’s realistic and sustainable for your team. For instance, if video production resources are limited, avoid a strategy that relies heavily on video content.
Lastly, you’ll want to set your social media posting schedule — figure out when and how often to post.
Posting consistently is more important than posting frequently. Choose a cadence that aligns with your capacity — whether it’s two to three posts per week or multiple posts per day. Plan your posts in advance to avoid burnout and maintain quality.
Your social media calendar can be so much more than a content timeline — it can be a touchstone for your team. Learn how to build calendar that combines day-to-day posting plans with campaign management, analytics, and team collaboration in our guide to creating a social media calendar.
Step 8: Allocate resources and budget
While many organic marketing tactics are, in theory, free, there are still things you’ll need to allocate some of your budget for. These include in-house team members, freelancers and contract roles, agencies, tools and software, advertising, influencer marketing, and more.
With that in mind, you’ll need to consider how you want to allocate your budget. Do you want to establish or expand your social media marketing team? How many roles does that entail, and what level of expertise are you looking to hire (i.e., entry-level versus senior)?
You’ll also need to account for the cost of tools and tactics. Many marketing tools have free or low-cost options, but other, more specialized tools will have a higher price point. They can absolutely be worth it, though, depending on your budget and what you’re hoping to get out of it.
Look for tools that combine functions so you can get more out of your purchase. Loomly combines content creation, collaboration workflows, analytics, community management, and calendar management and publishing into one jam-packed social media management tool.
Step 9: Document your social media strategy
Once you’ve finalized your strategy, it’s time to officially document it and turn it into a social media presentation so you can share it with your team.
Make sure your document outlines everything we’ve covered so far in this article: your goals, KPIs, content plan, audience, and more. Include specific action steps, timelines, and who on your team will execute which part of the strategy.
Use our free social media strategy template as a starting point, then add in your own information as well as visuals to summarize major steps. Including flowcharts, calendars, and other visual aids can make the information even more comprehensive.
Add call-out sections that can help you summarize key points and highlight how the strategy will align with business goals so you can get stakeholders on board. This point is especially important if you need to pitch a certain marketing budget in order to make your strategy possible.
Step 10: Set up workflows to implement your strategy
Finally it’s implementation time! Assign everyone on your team their roles in this step so that everyone is on the same page and can get the ball rolling. Keep the strategy as a living document and refer back to it often as you put together new campaigns or initiatives to make sure they align with your overall goals.
To do this, you need to turn your strategy into tactics. Break down high-level goals and plans into smaller, actionable tasks. For example, putting one person in charge of ideating and creating several pieces of content for one single purpose.
Put together workflows that can help streamline your processes and ensure regular content posting, engagement, and performance tracking. Plus, you can set up approval workflows so that lower-level team members can submit content ideas to senior members before it goes live.
Rolling out a social media strategy starts with content and continues all the way through publication, moderation, and analysis. Here's how to build a social media workflow that incorporates your strategy.
Create your own social media strategy today
A social media strategy isn’t a one-and-done document. You may need to go back and make changes or adjustments as you monitor your performance. Set up regular audits and check-ins to review your progress against your KPIs, and adjust accordingly.
Take advantage of available marketing tools to further improve your strategy and streamline your processes. Loomly’s social media management tools are the perfect partner to any social medi marketing strategy. Sign up for a 15-day free trial to test drive our offerings.
