Well, so you know where your target audience congregates online, you have social media accounts set up (complete with an accurate brand profile), and you are now prepared to begin posting.
Hold on a sec; what are you planning to share? If you’re going to post, how frequently do you plan to do so?
To tackle these questions and more, you need a social media strategy. This article will outline the ten easy steps to developing a social media content strategy. When you’re done, you’ll have a plan for how often and what kind of content to share on social media.
8 Steps for Social media content planning
Let’s get one thing out of the way first: your social media posts should always be about helping others. If you want to attract, nurture, and sell on social media, ditch the shameless self-promotion and focus instead on providing value.
Evaluate your social media audience profile and your aims again
In a nutshell, if you want your audience to interact with your material, you need to provide stuff that they care about. To begin working on such targeted content, you should first identify your target audience by developing a buyer’s persona.
Doing so will help you determine the subjects that will fascinate your intended readers, whether you’re trying to teach them something or simply entertain them.
Improve your social media content categories for each platform.
Continue honing your content types now
If you have a long list of potential topics, narrow it down to the three or four that interest you the most.
It’s ideal if you can interact with members of your intended audience or have established a community in which to get this information. To learn more about your followers’ social media content preferences, you may either conduct a poll or a survey.
The choice of format is up to you
Many forms are available for use in social media strategies. One strategy is to focus on videos first. You could, alternatively, produce a large amount of text. A fantastic combination, ideally, includes a healthy variety of each.
When you know what kinds of posts (text, link, video) are most popular, you can make more of them. Until you learn what resonates most with your audience, switching things up by trying new formats is a fantastic way to keep things fresh.
Lay Out a Strategy for Participation
In addition to impressing readers, high-quality material encourages them to interact with you. Need a certain way to keep people interested? Try asking them. How? Read on!
Hold Ask Me Anything (AMA) sessions
There was some discussion about hosting these in Stories, but you could also simply upload them directly to your social network accounts.
Have a vote.
Polls are a great addition to any social media strategy because they need no extra work on the part of your audience.
Entails formulating a strategy for disseminating the work of others
If we’re talking about interacting with people, it’s also beneficial to spread around the work of others. Sharing and retweeting material from other social media accounts is a great way to increase your engagement and reach. This will make you seem less self-absorbed and more willing to give your listeners what they need.
But, keep in mind that doing so comes with a great deal of responsibility. Why? For the simple reason that what you choose to share reflects what you find acceptable (unless you specify otherwise, for instance, by reposting with a comment).
So before you post anything, make sure it’s relevant to your audience and consistent with your brand’s ethos.
Recycle and compile existing materials
A common misconception is that constant content creation is all that is required for a successful media strategy. Why? Because you’ll be doing a lot of content curation and repurposing as well!
To start, you can recycle older works. In the first step above, we suggested looking through your blog in search of popular posts. Start reusing that information right away.
Establish a strategy to motivate your audience to supply original material
Now in your social content pipeline you have original content, content that has been recently published elsewhere, content that has been curated, and content that has been reused. Do you realise what’s still lacking? A term for content created by users, often known as UGC.
This is the material that your customers produce for you. In addition to filling your social media content calendar, this is crucial since UGC is seen by 60% of people as the most genuine form of material. In addition, consumer analytics show that UGC outperforms content that brands produce themselves in terms of influence.
Formulate a plan for self-promotion
The next step is to establish a schedule for promoting your company and a method for disseminating your blog posts.
You may get your stuff out there in many different ways. You can use paid advertising, social media, or organic search to do this. Marketing on social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn has proven effective for businesses looking to broaden their customer base.
The greatest way to do this is, as we’ve said before, to concentrate on serving others. Posting social media captions written in a salesy, promotional style is a surefire way to lose followers. Yet, you can grab your audience’s attention if you create excitement about something new they can expect, such as an upcoming report or a forthcoming feature.
To sum up
Developing an approach to social media is not difficult, especially if you break the process down into manageable chunks. Start your social media campaign by defining your audience and objectives. Plan out the material you want to make, the formats you’ll use, when you’ll post it, and how you’ll interact with your audience from there.