How to Develop a Social Media Strategy Step-by-Step?

When it comes to social media, most businesses are either not aware or fail to understand that posting is not marketing. Most social media business accounts out there are just blindly making posts, without having any strategy. Why? Well, either they’re not aware there is one, or they are aware but choose not to adopt one.

Whether you’re a seasoned business or a new start-up, if you’re on social media but haven’t adopted a strategy for marketing your business, it’s never too late.

Here are six ways to develop a social media strategy for your business – step-by-step.

1. Set Your Goals

Setting strategic goals starts with asking yourself the right questions for your business and having your answers. Some of the questions are:

1) What do I want to get from social media presence?
2) Do I want to get more brand visibility?
3) Do I want to generate sales?
4) Do I want more leads?
5) Do I want more traffic?
6) Do I need better conversions?
7) Do I want to improve community engagement?
8) What else do I want from social media?

No matter what you want your business to get out of your social media presence, in the final analysis, it must ensure that more people become aware of your company, your brand, your products and/or your services.  For this, the least expected out of you is to provide quality content that informs and/or educates your prospective and existing customers.

You will be able to figure out (a) what kind of value you want to provide, (b) using what kind of content, only based on your goals. That’s why you have to decide what is it exactly that you want to accomplish with your social media presence.

2. Choose Your Channels

Choosing your channels is key, as not all channels can deliver the best for goals that are specific to your business.

For instance, if you’re a product based business and your goal is to drive more sales, Facebook (FB) is a platform that is suitable for your goal. The same can’t be said about Instagram, where you can share links on your bio section but can’t get anywhere close to the kind of clicks you can get on FB.

If you’re a consultant or coach on the other hand, and if you want to position yourself as a thought leader in a specific industry or field of expertise, both LinkedIn and YouTube can be effective platforms for you. You can publish articles (text) on LinkedIn and share your thoughts in the form of videos on YouTube. The advantage with the latter is that you can also publish long form content in the form of podcasts, which can be a powerful way to share your knowledge and expertise.

Unless you have a sizable team, you should ideally start off with just one or two social media channels. Else, it can get overwhelming, spread your efforts thin (very wide but very shallow too), or it is more likely that you will never be able to execute your strategy as planned. Simply put, you may not get the desired results if you’re going to be all over the place on social media.

Over time however, when you have generated some revenue, you can always diversity your presence across channels and manage them through a team. The best part is, once you diversify, you will be able to repurpose the content you had already created for your older channels on the new ones

3. Perform Social Media Audit

Simply put, a social media audit is nothing but identifying what’s working well and what isn’t with your social media accounts. You can do this by checking the following, among others:

a) How fast or slow your account is growing in terms of followers?
b) Are there any patterns when it comes to gaining or losing followers? Like a specific day or time during the week when you lose or gain followers?
c) What kind of content is engaging your audience the most? Like product posts, offers, special days, festival posts, office activities, etc.?
d) What kind of posts are engaging your audience the most? Like images, videos, carousel or text posts?
e) Do users ask questions on the comments section and/or do they DM (direct message) you?
f) What are the user demographics?
g) Where are they from?
h) What language do they speak?
i) What age they belong to?
j) Users of what age bracket and gender engage the most?
k) What are their interests?

How does asking these questions help you? In many ways, in fact. For instance, if most of your users are from India and a majority of the engagements, be it likes, comments and DMs are from them; you should publish your posts going by IST (Indian Standard Time) and not some other time zone.

Doing a similar exercise and getting answers across the other questions will give you a clear picture about what is working and what’s not; and you can accordingly create a plan. Remember: When you make a plan, and stick to it – you never waste time!

4. Create a Profile of Your Target Audience

If you have a website, an easy way to create your audience profile is to use Google Analytics and find out what kind of audience are visiting your website and what product or service you’re offering are they interested in?

Similarly, if you have a FB account, you can use data from FB’s page insights and Instagram Insights. In fact, the very reason why both the platforms have provided you with analytics, like Google, is help you leverage the data and accordingly create a strategy that’s specifically suited for your business.

5. Research Your Competition

This is one of the most valuable things you can do to develop a social media strategy for your business. Valuable, because you can make close observations of your competitions’ social media pages, especially the ones that are doing very well and implement some if not all the strategies that’s working for them.

What is important though, is that you ensure these accounts are ideally targeting the same audience or a similar audience that you intend to target. For instance, if you’re intending to focus your brand on trainers, coaches and consultants in India who are 30 years or older, you need to observe only those accounts that cater to the same audience segment.

Remember: The research you do on your competition is nothing but real-time case studies that are out there in the public domain! So just find out, observe, and most of all; learn what they are doing to promote their product or service. Find out things like (among others):

1) Since when are they posting?
2) What kind of posts did they start with?
3) How often are they posting?
4) What kind of posts are they posting of late? Like videos, images, carousels, shorts, and reels?
5) What are the social channels they’re a part of?
6) Are they using the same content across all the channels?
7) Are they adopting different strategies for different platforms?
8) What kind of posts have the most engagement?
9) Have any of their posts gone viral?
10) What’s the topic of the content that went viral?
11) What is the reason why it went viral?
12) Which of their posts didn’t do well?
13) Why did they not do well?

Finding out answers for even some if not all the questions above can help you develop an effective social media strategy – for your business.

6. Prepare Your Content Calendar

Last but never the least, make sure you prepare a calendar for publishing your social media content – and stick to it! Ideally, you may choose to make use of tools like Hootsuite or Post Planner to organize your posts and publish it as per the schedule you have strategically decided upon. In fact, preparing your content calendar and sticking to it is a very effective way of getting your desired results through social media.

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