The social media content strategy of your brand should naturally align with your overall marketing strategy and company objectives. The first question you should ask yourself is: How can you most effectively use content to achieve broader social media objectives?
There are 3 Basic Steps for developing a content strategy.
#1 Analyzing Past Successful Content and Target Audience
As a brand you should begin with analyzing and researching past content that drove a relatively higher engagement from your audience. Doing so will increase the probability of higher engagement in the future content you produce. The best way to do that is by conducting and analyzing a social media audit. Social media platforms or advertising platforms have their own analytics base in general like google analytics, Facebook page insights. You must utilize those platforms and analyze the reports carefully while recording any important data you see. Analyze each social media platform differently keeping in mind to treat each social media platform’s following/fan-base as an audience with a different state of mind. During your social media content strategy audit be sure to label performing posts with the specified network and not mix them. You can consider launching a small competition, a poll, a giveaway, etc., and see how your customer base responds.
If you decide to run a giveaway, you could measure average engagements on different products and get insight into which product is more liked. So by testing different approaches, you’ll get a much clearer vision of your audience’s interests and needs, all the while being equipped with new ideas and strategies to use for the future.
Also, analyze your competitors’ social media content strategies and ideas and get inspired by them but do not copy them. Instead, make yours even better than theirs or copy what they are doing in a better or unique way. Have a keen eye for the types of topics, niches, and keywords being targeted by your competitors. Ask yourself these questions:
“Can I add their strategy in my own strategy” “Can I target the topics my competitors are targeting? ”
Related: 7 Mind-Blowing Social Media Tips For Startups
#2 List your goals and objectives
Now that you’re done with analyzing your social media content strategy, target audience, and popular content, the next step is to form a plan with goals.
When setting goals, it’s a good rule of thumb to set a performance target as well as goals for individual pieces of content. As an example, one objective you could set in your strategy is to decrease the bounce rate to a landing page from Twitter by 10% in 3 months.
Another example of a goal can be the promotion of 3 different copies of a lead magnet aiming to cap a total of 1000 leads from that landing page.
Make a list of these goals and list them by priority. Link the goals with each other and form co-relations between them. It’s also important to have a detailed discussion with content creators in your organization, like your copywriters, and share previous content data with them to influence the next content being created.
This, of course, will also mentally prepare your employees to complete their work with a much more goal-oriented mind.
#3 Content Distribution
The final execution step for your social media content strategy will be distribution. Initially consider the type of content you’ll be distributed on different platforms and decide how often will that be happening. Before posting content, make sure to look back at the important analytic data you gathered from the social media audit. Then, carefully compare it with the content ready to be distributed. Research on new and trending ways to market content such as chatbots, podcasts, live videos, etc. Test which of the new trends work best with your content type.
However, whatever test you make, be sure to maintain your brand’s style throughout your communications.
The next step after that is to create a timeline for content distribution. The number of times you wish to post is different for all brands and will require some testing and optimization. In order to determine and optimize what converts the best for your brand on each network, it is advised to test the amount and type of posts that will be optimal for the said platform.
As an example, let’s say your engagement drops after a specific test you made, you shouldn’t go further beyond the limits you just discovered and amend your strategy in accordance with your new discovery. Make sure that you’re considering your posting schedule relative to the respective network as the schedule will be different for all the channels.
The whole schedule, testing, and optimization you will perform will later refine itself into a very neat, realistic, and laid-out plan that will greatly benefit you in the long run. Like for example, you will get a very strong idea of how much content you need, the quality of content and how often do you need it.
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