Whether you are just starting with content marketing or an old player re-visiting your content plan, refining your content strategy, making it innovative, and engaging for your customers, so your business or your client’s business can keep up with the competition.
Social media is no longer just a medium for people to connect with their friends and family. It has become a valuable networking tool for companies to interact and influence their target audience.
To succeed, you must create compelling social media posts through a well-defined content strategy.
10 steps to create an effective social media content strategy
Before you read the steps – Make sure that you have answers to the following key questions:
- Who is your target audience?
- What are the problem areas that your audience face?
- Can you provide the solution with your brand’s USP?
- What kind of content formats can you create?
- How and where you can publish your content?
1. Identify and Set Goals
Begin with identifying the purpose, the reason behind creating the content.
Then set goals as per the SMART goal framework. The goals need to be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timebound.
For Example – We will build brand awareness by increasing ‘X’ number of followers through engaging content on Facebook within ‘X’ number of weeks.
2. Build buyer personas
For creating a successful social media content strategy, you need to define your content’s target audience clearly. Learn everything you can know like age, demographic location, average income, typical job title/industry, interests/hobbies, etc., about your target audience.
It will help you build clear buyer personas. Furthermore, it will help you produce more relevant and valuable content with the right message for targeting the right consumers in social media ads.
3. Know your competition
Your competitors are also using social media, and understanding your competition can give your insight into what they are doing and how they are using social media for achieving their business goals. Do a competitive analysis to understand what they are doing well and what not so that you can prepare your content strategy strategically, encasing their loopholes. You can also use social listening techniques to keep an eye on your competition.
4. Perform a social media audit
Once you have identified and set your goals, buyer personas, and competition, it’s time to conduct a social media content audit. On all social media platforms – Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest Business, and LinkedIn Business accounts, through social audit tools, you can easily export your post and page analytics directly. If you think a post is working well, now with quantitative data, you know how each social media post has performed.
5. Decide which platform to focus more on
A social network’s popularity depends on the strength of its users. Overall, Facebook is, by far, the most popular social network. However, it is crucial to choose a social network platform wisely based on how well it fits with your content plan.
6. Choose a CMS for blogging
You must have a system to create, manage, and track your blog content. For example, a Content Management System (CMS) like WordPress can help you plan, produce, publish, and measure the result of your content. You can also choose to share your content via direct posting blogs on social media platforms like LinkedIn.
7. Determine which type of content you want to create
There are different types of social media content that you can create. From blog posts, eBooks, case studies, templates, infographics to videos, podcasts, and more. Each content format has specific USPs and can be used based on your goals and target audience.
8. Build a social media content calendar
Just creating and sharing content is not enough. It can cause content clutter. With a content calendar, you can have a big-picture approach to social media content planning. Apart from deciding what content to post on which social network channel, when to post, is equally vital for an effective social media content strategy. The content calendar can be further collaborated with the social media holiday calendar for feature content and use it to connect with your target audience.
9. Publish and distribute content
Like planning and publishing your social media content is essential; having a good distribution strategy is equally vital. With it, your content may sit idle with no one to read it. A useful distribution tool makes sure your content gets in front of the right people, in time, and lots of them.
10. Measure your content
Lastly, measuring the performance of your social media content is an imperative segment of content strategy. When you are trying to engage users on social media, you must think about using social media metrics to measure the performance of social media activity.
Conclusion
You have to continually refine your content strategy to keep it up to date and unique. Apart from creating exclusive content, you can find inspiration from other businesses that are doing great on social media and make content engaging. You can strategically use social media success stories like Facebook’s, use customer testimonials/reviews, or showcase customer stories, and case studies to create compelling social media content.
Need a quick content consult? Get in touch with me at contact@sanjayb.com.