Assuming you can rule the social media without a social media content strategy, is overestimating yourself. So, if you have been putting off creating a social media content strategy, and are randomly posting your content but not getting the desirable response then this article is for you. An effective social media content strategy goes a long way if you’re trying to build a successful online presence that will you gain more and more followers. Here, we’ll help you learn the different ways in which you can create an effective social media strategy.
What Is a Social Media Content Strategy?
A social media content strategy is your plan of action towards dominating the social media. It covers everything from what you post, when you post and how frequently you post. The reason behind creating and implementing a strategy is to understand what you want to achieve from your social presence, how to create the content that will get you there, and to make sure that you’re hitting your goals.
How to Create a Social Media Content Strategy
If you wish to get good returns from your social media, you’ll need to create and implement a social media marketing strategy. Building a good social media marketing content strategy may sound difficult and time taking, however, it’s not so. With the right planning and ways, you can create the best strategy for your online content. Once you’ve built it and are ready to implement it, you’ll be able to dominate the social media trends while minimising the efforts that you put into it every day. Here are top 7 ways to build an effective social media content strategy.
Set Target Goals
Setting goals is very important when it comes to achieving success in just about everything and social media is no exception. How do you want your social media to influence the world for you? You can choose as many goals as you want, but initially, you should start out with a few that are most essential for your brand/content promotion. Some of these social media goals are:
– To increase brand awareness
– Drive traffic to your website
– Manage brand reputation
– To generate new leads
– Understand your audience better
– To build a community
– Provide effective customer support
– To increase press mentions
But these aren’t the only goals that you can set. Each content creator/influencer is unique and will have different things that they’re hoping to achieve. So, you can add your goals accordingly.
Determine Your Target Audience
The next step is to find your target audience. This doesn’t mean you’ll go around making assumptions about who you think is your target audience. You should consider your audience based on different demographic, geographic and data like age, location, job title, industry, interests, fears, motivations, pain points. This information is easy to get access to with social media analytics tools that are easily available online. Most social media platforms have their own audience insights tools that enables you to understand and define your target audience in a better way.
Analyse Your Competitors
Now, this is really important if you wish to be a good creator or social media star. Once you’re done with your target audience, you’re ready to learn more about your competitors. Again, there are many social media competitor analysis tools that can make this process a lot easier. You have to keep up what your competitors are doing on social media: how often they post, what they post, when they post, how often they engage with their followers, the hashtags they use, etc. So, it’s important to not only keeping track of the successful things they do but also what they fail to do or aren’t good at.
Define Your Platforms and Topics
While trying to build a stronger hold on other media platforms, you can’t share your content on the social media platforms out there. Firstly, there are too many of them. And secondly, your target audience isn’t going to be on all of them. Also, once you’ve researched about your target audience, you’re most likely to know what social media platforms they use. Those are the ones you have to set your targets on.
After that, it’s all up to you, what you wish to talk about. You’ll want to promote your brand, products and services, but it’s also important to entertain them with your content or add value to your content instead of acting like a salesman all the time. In order to do that, you’ll have to put thoughts into what your audience wants to know, what will entertain them and can still be related to your products, services, and brand. If you’re creating social media content for a jewellery service, you might share information about different ornaments, how to mix and match them with different outfits, or something.
Make a Social Media Content Calendar
After determining the platforms you’re going to use, it’s time to create a social media content calendar. This is going to ensure that you’re posting often, on the right days, and reaching out to your target audience at the right time. Once you build your content calendar, you’ll start to notice intervals in your content and posting schedule or spots where your content is too massive on promotions. In nutshell, your social media content calendar is going to help you make sure that your content is engaging and interesting and peppered with just the right amount of salesy content.
Create and Curate Content
Now comes the enjoyable bit: creating and curating content! With the help of your calendar, you can start to put together content that will engage and inspire your target audience. But, if you aren’t sure about what to create, don’t worry. Below mentioned are some great ideas for the kind of content you can include in your social media content strategy.
Influencer Content
Partner with an influencer whose audience likes the same content as yours. There are different types of influencers, all with their own advantages and disadvantages, so be sure to choose an influencer that makes sense for your brand’s goals. For example, if you have a smaller businesses and narrow niches, then you might look at micro-influencers since they have higher engagement rates.
Stories
Instagram Stories are a great way to reach out to your followers and tap into their fear of missing out on you content since they’ll want to watch it before it disappears. But then, of course, you’ll have to create content that they wouldn’t want to miss.
Audiograms
You can share interesting snippets of your content on your social media platforms using audiograms if you are a YouTuber or podcaster. Creating a visually appealing version of your audio content. Several apps can be used to create attractive and engaging audiograms like the aptly-named Audiogram, as well as Headliner, Wavve, and others.
TikToks & Reels
TikTok videos and Reels use short-form video content to entertain, educate, and engage your followers. They don’t go away like Instagram Stories so they can be shared and looked at any time since they last forever until you delete them. Short-form content is really fun to watch and engaging and thus, very popular.
Product Shots
The content you create to promote your brand has a lot to compete with, on social media. So, it needs to be visually-appealing and of value to your followers. Images of your products that you share with the viewers should be creative, beautiful and fun as the rest of the content. Always consider your brand’s personality in order to create product shots that won’t let it down.
Candid Content/Behind-the-shots
Marketing is huge these days. The consumers want to know what brands stand for and are interested in the people working for the brand, behind the curtains. Share content (pictures or videos) that shows you and your team being real and human. With behind-the-scenes content, you can let the audience and followers know more about your team and the ‘fun’ part that you do.
User-Generated Content
User-generated content (UGC) is the content created by your followers/users. You can use this content to promote your brand while ensuring that the users are also involved. When you consider the value of your audience/consumers, they place their trust in making their purchasing decisions. UGC is trusted 50% more by millennials over original content and it widely influences the brand value.
Reuse Content on other platforms
Try to make use of the content that you have created and already published. Once used, it doesn’t have to be dead to you. You can repurpose this content by sharing it on IGTV to generate more interest and more views. You can also repurpose your Insta content(videos) for TikTok and vice versa.
Stock Photos
Creating your own content is the way to go but don’t shy away from using stock photos when they work. They tend to be a fantastic way to create wonderful visuals without a serious amount of effort or money. A stock photo might just do the trick.
Behind-the-Scenes
Consumers often want to know who are the people they’re supporting. With behind-the-scenes content, you can let your audience get to know your associates and give them an unforgettable look at how some of the things get done.
Games & Challenges
Social media is for entertaining people and adding fun to their lives. Participating in games and challenges is great for brands to engage more and more viewers. It’s even better if the brands create their own games and challenges. This type of content is very useful in getting you more user-generated content, expanding your reach, and increasing engagement.
Analyse and Amend Your Social Media Content Strategy
The last step in building a social media content strategy is to make sure that it works. In order to do that, track the results of your newly created content strategy and then after analysing these results make changes accordingly, if required. There are several social media measures that will help you understand how your content is performing:
– Engagement Rate: The number of interactions with your content divided by impressions (number of views). This lets you know how willing your audience is to act on your content.
– No of Likes (Organic & Paid)
– No of Clicks: A simple count of the number of clicks your content gets. This helps you understand what causes your followers to click.
– Reach: The number of unique views your content received. This tells you how far your content makes it into user’s feeds.
– Sentiment: A measure of how users react to your content, how they feel about it.
After you know how your content is performing, make changes to improve your content. The goal is to enhance your performance with time, on the platform and see positive changes in the statistics.
Use a Social Media Content Strategy to Dominate it
Social media has gone from a simple way of connecting with friends and family, to a powerhouse of brand or content promotion (marketing). And, everyone wishes to achieve great goals using these social media platforms. However, without the right strategy, one cannot rule the social media platforms in terms of engagement or promotion.
Try to take out some time to create a good social media content strategy using the above-mentioned points, in order to avoid wasting lots of time and resources in future. A good content strategy can take you places that you have never really thought of.
