Creating An Effective Social Media Content Strategy

Your social media posts have the ability to turn your brand into a household name and your followers into fans. These kinds of results only come around with a solid social media content strategy. It can be difficult to make your posts stand out on social media but it is important that you set specific goals, create value in your posts and distribute your content across the right platforms. Every businesses strategy will differ depending on your industry and audience, there are however certain things you should do that will help your business and brand grow…

Setting goals

Before you start posting anything you need to first work out your content goals. By having certain goals it allows you to start planning what kind of content you should be creating. You need to be understanding of your overall marketing goals and then extrapolate from there.  Work out how you’re going to use social media to support you in achieving these marketing goals. The more specific your marketing goals are, the better position you’ll be in to tailor your social media content to meet those goals. For example, you’re wanting to increase the number of sales you’re converting from social media. You should be looking at incorporating posts that send people to a landing page or somewhere else in the marketing funnel.

Plan your content

Once you know your goals, planning your content becomes much easier. By looking at your past social media posts and seeing what did and didn’t perform well on each platform, you can start to understand what content your followers are going to want.

Using tools like Buffer it puts all of your data and analytics in one place. However, this can all be done without a social media tool, you can analyze your data by going onto each platform and exporting the analytics into a spreadsheet. When looking at this data you should be looking for it to be aligning with your goals. For example, if you’re looking to increase engagement on your social media posts, you would be looking at the number of clicks, shares and likes on a post. This is easier for things like increasing your brand awareness where you can look at which posts resulted in new followers. Following your analysis, you should have a better idea of what kind of posts you should be putting out there to maximise engagement.

Not only is it the content you’re putting out there that you should be thinking about, but it’s also the tone you’re writing the content in. In order to build trust and relationships with your followers, you want to make sure your brand has an authentic and genuine voice. People are more likely to engage with a company who are genuine and “human-like” online, instead of posts that are inauthentic or irrelevant.

Build a content calendar

You’ve worked out your goals and you know what performs well, it’s now time to get a plan together to decide what content to distribute and when. It will allow you to visualize your ideas and organize them so that your strategy will be easier to execute. When planning what content you’re going to post don’t worry about repurposing content and scheduling it across multiple platforms. However, for optimal growth on your platforms you’ve got to make sure that you’re offering value everywhere. There is no point in publishing the same content across every platform as it isn’t going to be encouraging for people to follow you on more than one social media. When deciding where you’re going to post, remember your findings and what performed well and where.

A content calendar makes it so much easier to collaborate on posts with different people in your company. By collaborating with other people in the business you’re able to create a more well-rounded distribution plan.

Promote and distribute your content

Creating and posting your content is only a small part of the success in a social media strategy. The other part is distributing your content so as many people as possible see it. There are several easy little tips that can help to increase the reach of your content.

• Encouraging your audience to engage with your content. Most recently, a growing change on social media is the use of online polls, which gets people to engage and can help start a discussion.
• Other people sharing your content. When people share your content it greatly increases the reach of the post and it allows you to respond and engage with your audience.
• If you blog including social sharing buttons. This means that your readers are easily able to distribute your content for you at just the click of a button.
• Hashtags. These often get overlooked because people often think they look tacky and spammy. However, if you can carefully slot one or two into your post it doesn’t cheapen the post and it’ll also greatly increase the reach of your content.
• Building relations is a great way to get people talking. If you reach out to people and businesses and engage with them it’s getting your name out there but also building relationships.

Measure your results

The final stage is measuring the results of all of your efforts. By keeping detailed metrics it allows you to tweak and optimize your plan. Ideally, you should be analyzing your data every month so you can see what is and isn’t working. A few of the most important things to keep an eye on are:

• ROI – The amount of time you put in reflects on  the number of conversions and referrals you get from external sources
• Engagements – The number of reactions, comments, clicks and shares that your content gets
• Awareness – The number of people who saw your content

Using this data that you’re gathering you’ll be able to make small tweaks to keep optimizing your social media content strategy.

If you’d like some help with your social media strategy don’t hesitate to get in touch.