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Digital Marketing

Social Media

Building a Social Media Content Strategy

Social media content strategy forms the bedrock of social media marketing. These efforts depend on how you build a content strategy, which will determine audience engagement and ultimately how you reach your social media goals.

min read

Dec 28, 2023

Social Media

Content

What is Content Strategy?

A social media content strategy is a comprehensive plan that outlines how content will be used to achieve specific marketing and communication goals on various social media platforms. This strategy encompasses identifying the target audience, understanding their preferences and behaviors, and creating content that resonates with them. Social media content strategy uses a mix of different formats such as text, images, videos, and interactive elements, tailored to the strengths of each platform and the interests of the audience. The strategy also includes scheduling and publishing content consistently, engaging with the audience, and analyzing the performance of the content to refine and adapt the strategy over time.

Building a social content strategy revolves around the dynamic nature of social feeds and how your content will engage a saavy and discerning social media audience. Unique creator-audience interactions from features like stories, reels, and interactive polls have broadened the scope of social content and opened the door to more content innovation for brands and creators. Social content strategy is a kaleidoscope of content formats, from text and images to videos and live streams, and requires a unique strategy that defines the content you will use to reach your social media goals.

Setting Content Goals

Developing a strategy that clearly outlines the steps to reach your content objectives is critical. Starting with goal-setting in your social content strategy is crucial as it informs and directs the individual posts that make up your social media strategy. The foundation of any effective content strategy is a clear understanding of how each type and category of content will help you reach your social media goals. Knowing your audience and engagement targets from the outset shapes your content needs and allows you to set realistic goals. Setting objectives that are (SMART) specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound will give you the most effective benchmarks to measure your success. With well-defined content objectives, every content piece you publish will strategically contribute towards your overall goals.

Defining Your Audience

Before defining your social content strategy, it's important to have a deep understanding of your audience. Knowing who your audience is will include demographics, interests, behaviors, preferences, and their online habits. Use these insights to tailor your content. For example, if your audience prefers educational content in the evenings, you might post informative blogs or videos during those times. Don’t be afraid to experiment based on your findings. Try different types of content and formats to see what works best. You should also continuously gather feedback and monitor how your audience responds to different content, and adapt your strategy accordingly.

Demographic Data: Begin with basic demographic information like age, gender, location, and education level. This forms the foundation of your audience profile.
Interests and Preferences: What are their hobbies, interests, and preferences? This information can be gleaned from the types of pages or accounts they follow and the content they interact with most.
Behavioral Insights: Look into their online behavior patterns. When are they most active on social media? What kind of content do they share or like? Understanding this is a quick route to emulate the same strategy.
Psychographic Data: This includes values, attitudes, and lifestyles. Psychographic data gives depth to your understanding, allowing you to create messages that are relevant to users on a personal level.

Choosing Platforms

When it comes to selecting social media platforms for your content strategy, remember that more isn't always better. You don't need to have a presence on every available social platform and a strong, engaging presence on a few platforms is more effective than being minimally present on many. Concentrate your efforts on platforms where your target audience is most active and likely to engage with your business. Different demographics have preferences for different platforms, but the nature of your content also dictates platform choice. Consider your resources in terms of what you are able to create. While TikTok may be the domain of younger demographics and outside of your traditional audience targets, your ability to create excellent video content may dictate your choice to invest in this platform, knowing that your brand can have an outsized impact with short-form video. Each platform should have a tailored approach, as what works on one may not work on another. Spreading too thin over multiple platforms can dilute your efforts and impact and more effort in individual content is most likely to create meaningful engagement and grow your social handle with new followers.

Content Mix

When planning your content, start by outlining the potential messages and information your content will communicate and categorize them into the most closely related groups of content. This could be a mix of promotional content for products or services , with a healthy balance of informative, inspirational, or entertaining posts. It's also important to plan this for the various content formats available on each platform, with realistic expectations for what you can deliver with the resources available for yourself or your team. Achieving a healthy balance among different formats and messaging is an effective approach to creating a content roadmap.

Relying on one type of content format or post type may limit engagement and diversifying your approach is crucial for benchmarking your content to understand what is driving engagement. Using different messaging, media formats, and other post attributes will allow you to continuously iterate on your social media content and and take action on trends and audience shifts. Additionally, A/B testing with varied headlines, images, and formats, followed by a thorough comparison of results, will allow you to fine-tune your approach when reviewing performance.

Collaboration

Collaboration through partnerships with influencers or other brands is a powerful tactic for creating awareness and expanding reach for your social handles. Any social account can introduce your brand to new, broader audiences. When selecting partners, it's important to choose those who align with your brand values and at least partially share a relevant audience. Collaborative efforts can range from co-branded campaigns and content takeovers to joint promotions and giveaways, and should have a mutually-beneficial time investment to ensure your collaboration has meaningful effort from both sides of the partnership . Measuring the success of collaborations is crucial as influencer audiences will vary wildly, and both qualitative analysis of comments and a quantitative understanding will help you evaluate the results.

Content Calendar

Setting up a content calendar is a critical part of your content strategy. Content calendars are a core feature in social media management tools, but a spreadsheet tool like Google Sheets or Airtable is also commonly used by brands and creators. This calendar serves as a the primary organizational tool for your social content and will help you allocate your visual assets with the right copy for each platform. Regular updates to the calendar is important for accountability so that the content calendar can be used as a reliable reference point for anyone involved in your social media efforts. Creating your own personal schedule to regularly add posts to a content calendar is a great way to ensure consistency and success for your social media goals. While maintaining a regular posting schedule can be challenging and is often not rigorously followed by many brands and creators, those who can stick to their calendars will have a major advantage.

Performance Analysis

Effective monitoring and adjusting your strategy based on results are essential for successfully reaching your social media goals. This ongoing process of monitoring, analyzing, and adapting ensures that social media efforts remain effective, relevant, and aligned with changing audience preferences and the social media landscape. Using analytics tools to track content performance and audience engagement is the cornerstone of this approach, and can be done through the analytics tools in each platform or through social media management tools. Analysis of engagement metrics helps identify which posts resonate the most, while insights into the most active times for followers can optimize content visibility.

Assessing the effectiveness of different content formats will provide important insights for content production and depending on the capabilities of your social analytics, you can measure audience preferences in terms of demographics, interests, and other attributes to inform your strategy refinement. Reviewing comments to understand how users respond to your content is a time consuming but worthwhile task to gauge sentiment and audience response. This process should end with adjustments to your content strategy which places more focus on high-performing post types, experiment with new content, and continually improve your content with new methods and better performance.