How to Create a Social Media Strategy in 8 Steps

The first stage is determining your goals – what do you want to see from your business’ social media usage? You can then use these goals to decide the areas to track, or your key performance indicators (KPIs).

Your social media goals will be unique to your business. There are plenty of directions they could take, such as an increase of product sales, website traffic, follower count, or engagement rate, but the main thing to remember is that they should always be shaped by your overarching business objectives. 

For instance, if your business strives to become prominent and highly-regarded within its sector, a helpful social media goal would be:

This goal will help you achieve your business objective by improving existing relationships and increasing social media visibility to attract new customers.

While it’s a good starting point, the wording is vague and lacks direction, which makes it feel unachievable. A great acronym for making your goals clear, focused, and growth-inspiring is SMART. These objectives should be:

• Simple
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Relevant
• Time-bound

Let’s transform the above example into a SMART goal:

Specifying timeframes, growth rate, and steps to achieve this goal make it much easier to implement. Plus, it will give you a better understanding of the key metrics to track.

Key Metrics

You can measure your social media metrics to see what impact your plans are making, and whether the numbers prove that your effort has had a positive result for the business. This will also help you to make data-driven decisions going forward.

Examples of key metrics you could track include:

• Engagement rate: this is the number of engagement actions (likes, shares, comments) a post receives from your total number of followers.
• Brand awareness: can be measured through metrics such as mentions, shares, links, and impressions over a specific time period.
• Audience growth: measures the speed at which your brand’s following increases on social media.
• Post reach and potential reach: reach is the number of people who have seen a post since it went live, while potential reach measures the number of people who could see a post during a certain period. Understanding this metric will help you work to expand your audience.

Your target audience is the people you’re trying to appeal to through your social media. Every part of your social media strategy – and even your wider strategy – should have them in mind, so it’s vital that you have a strong understanding of who they are.

To identify your target audience, ask yourself some key questions about them, such as:

• What is their age group, gender, and location?
• What is their level of education and their occupation?
• What are their hobbies and interests?
• What pain points are they experiencing?

These questions are a great starting point, but the more information you can gather about them the better, because you’ll use it to shape your brand personality and social media strategy.

For those with a social media presence already, you can use inbuilt and third-party tools to discover this information and more about your followers.

Inbuilt Social Media Analytics

Many social media platforms provide free insights on the app. For example, with Instagram for business, you can gather data about how your followers engage with your posts, reels, stories, and live videos. Plus, you can view your follower demographics and the times they are active on the platform, which can help you understand the types of content to create and the best times to post it.

The information isn’t as in depth as what you’d get from paid analytics tools, but will be enough to help you develop an understanding of your audience, especially for businesses that are only active on one or two social platforms.

Third-Party Social Media Analytics

The benefit of third-party platforms like Sprout Social’s analytics dashboard is that you can view the performance of all your platforms together. With this tool, you’ll be able to view detailed data about your audience’s demographics and the ways they engage with your posts, such as through clicking links, commenting, and reacting. Clear comparisons between platforms will show you which channels are seeing the most activity, thereby helping you to refocus your strategy.

While Sprout Social’s analytics dashboard isn’t free like Instagram analytics, businesses with a rapidly growing multi-channel presence will get their money’s worth from the in-depth insights.

Now it’s time for some competitor analysis so you can learn from what your rivals are doing – or, perhaps more pertinently, what they’re not doing. This will help you to understand who your main competitors are, and where new opportunities to make money via social media might lie.

Competitor analysis is also beneficial for the following reasons:

• It’s another way to discover your target audience
• It shows you the pricing, promotions, and other general incentives your competitors are offering, which uncovers areas of improvement for your social media strategy
• Seeing which influencers your competitors work with will give you an indication of the types of collaborations you should focus on

Social listening is a great starting point for researching your market and competitors. You can begin by doing searches of the competition’s company name and account handles on social media to check out what they’re sharing.

Key areas to make note of are:

• The platforms they use and how they use them differently
• Their posting schedule – how often and at what times they post
• Their strategy for sharing promotional content – this could be working with influencers, or promoting their own sales and deals
• The ways they interact with their customers – this could be through polls, Q&As, or giveaways

You should also search social media for mentions of your own brand, as well as keywords related to your business and industry, to stay in the loop.

Creating your social media accounts is a two pronged process. Firstly, you need to choose the right platforms to use, and then once you’re on them, you need to know how to present your business reputably.

How to Choose the Right Social Media Platforms

The best social media platforms for artists wont necessarily be the best options for lawyers, so Here’s how to use the previous steps to choose the right social media accounts for your business:

1. Goals and objectives – Every platform has different capabilities, so consider which will help you to reach your goals. For instance, if your focus is to drive traffic to your site, Facebook’s targeting and link posts make it a great option. X’s conversational style means it’s a great option for businesses looking to build customer relationships, while Instagram and TikTok’s focus on imagery and video makes them great for raising awareness of demonstrable products.
2. Audience research – Research social media platforms with your audience research in mind. Look into the gender split and age groups using each platform, and use the ones that align with your audience the most.
3. Competitor analysis – Think about which platforms your competitors use and how their audiences interact with each one.

Making the Most of Your Social Media Accounts

Once you’ve chosen your social media platform, you’ll need to make your profile look trustworthy and reputable if you want to grow your business online. To achieve this you should:

• Fill out all of the profile fields with your business’ important information
• Make use of as many features as possible. For example, creating a broadcast channel will link it to your profile, maximizing your online presence as much as possible and encouraging trust
• Post regularly, and make that content relevant to your audience. Not all your posts have to involve your products or services. Posting other content related to your niche is a great way to show expertise in your field!

Now it’s time to start posting! A content calendar is a schedule of the types of social media content you’ll post, when, and on which platforms. Plotting it out and sticking to it is a way to ensure your content is focused, balanced, uploaded regularly, and evenly distributed between your platforms.

It’s good to create a plan for each of your platforms because they’ll all have multiple different post styles to consider. An Instagram content calendar will mainly include posts, stories, and reels, whereas a schedule for X would be focused more on textual content. Collating these plans into one place is a great way to ensure that the quantity and style of content on each platform aligns with your goals.

How to Create Your Content Calendar

There are multiple ways to go about creating your content calendar. Some businesses like to design them in an Excel spreadsheet or Google Sheet, while others prefer a more structured template, like Sprout Social’s social media calendar.

Whatever option you choose, you should think about and include the following:

• The social media account(s) each post will be shared to
• The format of each post – this could be text, photos, videos, or stories
• Any relevant hashtags and keywords to include in the post
• The date it will be posted
• Your KPIs to monitor each post and track progression towards your goals

Creating engaging visual content is key to growing your business online – it’s what will make you memorable and keep your audience coming back.

You should keep your content ideas in line with your brand voice and the interests of your audience, but also the business goals you want to achieve.

Good to know: Short videos are an effective way to show your products on social media. According to research, 87% of businesses see an increase in sales from this content style, and 44% of customers prefer it to other social media marketing.

Here’s how to create quality social media content:

• Bring value by solving your customers’ problems – if you sell cosmetics online to customers that struggle to find affordable products, your content could show your cheapest deals, as well as guides and tips for making the most out of your products
• Make your content unique – Use competitors posts for inspiration, but make your content unique by reflecting your brand voice, personality, and areas of expertise. To keep consistent with this when you’re creating branded content, you could create and refer to a unique value proposition.
• Keep up to date with trends, especially on fast moving platforms like TikTok. You should mix content that responds to or joins in with a relevant current trend with your regular posts. The algorithms tend to favor these posts.
• Adhere to social media SEO to maximize your visibility on social media.

Content batching – the process of bulk creating content and scheduling them to post on your account at a later date – is a great way to organize your time, plan in advance and therefore reduce stress. The result? No manual posting daily and a clear overview of your strategy week by week, which is great for sharing content plans with the wider business.

Here are some of my favorite tools for automating social posts:

• Hootsuite is ideal for all-in-one social media monitoring, scheduling, and analytics. It also comes with a social streams feature, which allows you to engage with your audience and monitor your social accounts right from a single, intuitive dashboard – simple!
• Sprout Social’s scheduling software can group your team members for easier collaboration, so it’s great for teamwork and social media management.
• CoSchedule is a tool focused on publishing. You can utilize CoSchedule’s dynamic content scheduling and calendar feature to manage your Facebook, X (learn how to sell on X), LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, and Tumblr social profiles from the same place, with ease.

The final step to creating a thriving social media plan? To keep trying new things and adjusting your strategy accordingly. Social media success is often a case of trial and error – and if you don’t try, you’ll never know.

Weekly reporting and reviewing metrics is a good place to start, and tracking engagement on posts will show you what’s working and what isn’t. If you use Google Analytics, you’ll also be able to see how much traffic social media is driving to your website week-on-week. Remember to refer back to your SMART goals, and create new ones when necessary.

Things on social media change quickly, as new channels emerge and popularity shifts. Therefore, your social media strategy should be something that can be reactive – don’t hesitate to make changes as you see fit, and learn more about your target audience as you go along. Keep your team engaged and updated too, so you can all work together to evolve your content and keep growing.

Knowing how to create a social media strategy is about more than creating social media accounts and posting about your business. You need to conduct research on your customers and competitors, choose the right platforms, and have a focused content plan.

Whether you’re creating a social media strategy from scratch or improving an existing one, implementing these eight steps will help you on your way.

Remember – your business is unique and what works for others might not work for you. Don’t be afraid to experiment and change direction – learning from trial and error will only improve your social media presence!