Crafting an Effective Social Media Content Strategy

Steps from Followers to Fans

Sadly, there’s no magic wand out there that can turn your social media strategy into a guaranteed success. Even when this fact is accepted, it’s certainly tempting to opt to update your followers in a purely sporadic manner when you have the time. But, if you want to see your brand truly grow, you’ll have to implement a solid marketing strategy. Below are a series of steps that you can take to help your brand grow and turn your followers into fans. 

• Identify specific goals
• Create valuable posts
• Distribute those posts to the right platforms
• Measure results

Once this four-step approach has been completed, you’ll be able to hone your strategy over time.

Identify Specific Goals

Goals are always the first and last thing we think of when implementing a long-term social media strategy. Initially, they will help decipher the type of content that is to be created. Examples of such goals might include raising general brand awareness, increasing community engagement, or driving increased traffic to your website.

Try to be specific. The more precise your marketing goals are, the easier it will be to ensure your social media content is tailored to them. 

Analysing your data can be as simple as exploring each platform’s analytics into a spreadsheet. This audit can help to pinpoint what type of content works particularly well with a specific goal.

Notice the Disconnect

Sometimes a particular post doesn’t garner the expected response. Often, this can be down to the language and inauthentic tone used.

As a rule, try to find that perfect match between researching your target audience and staying true to your brand values. Your audience didn’t originally choose to follow you for no reason.

Aside from a tone that doesn’t ring true, one giant red flag to avoid is irrelevant content – second only to poor customer service as a reason why consumers unfollow brands.

Target Audience Research

If you want your audience to go from being potential customers to paying customers, it’s essential that you get into the mind of your followers. As such, make sure to do some target audience research as a means to create great social content. This could include things like basic demographics, acquisition channels and content preferences. As nice as it would be to strike gold with each post on all of your social platforms, be sure to allocate your time and effort to the platforms that serve your brand and your audience the most.

Visualise and Organise

A great social media content strategy is easy to execute. Once your primary goals have been set and your research stage has been carried out, consider the use of a social media content calendar. Think of it as a hub for everything you post, allowing a big-picture approach to the strategy as a whole.

Furthermore, a content calendar facilitates workmate collaboration within your company.

Your strategy will involve the collective knowledge of a lot of different people within your organization. A content calendar makes it easier to collaborate on social media posts with different people across your company.

Promotion and Distribution

Naturally, you need as many people to see your posts as possible – something that is made possible when you’ve established a content distribution strategy.

For blog posts, be sure to include share buttons so your audience can distribute your content to their own followers, with others sharing your content only augmenting its perceived reliability.

Ask questions to help increase engagement and fill out those comment sections.

Right place, Right time – Recognizing when your audience is active is key to making sure you’re sharing posts at the right time and therefore getting optimum visibility, while the use of hashtags helps extend your reach further to those following certain interests or trends. 

So long as everything you share with your audience is valuable to them and relates to your brand, don’t shy away from the idea of networking with bloggers and content creators with your niche – a potential win-win.

Hindsight into Foresight

The final pit stop to an effective social media content strategy involves measuring the results of your labour. Perhaps you’ll need to make tweaks to optimize results moving forward. We’d recommend a monthly analysis of your content’s analytics to keep track of how things are going – how each piece of content performed, what variables it had working with it and how well the content contributed to the overall content goals.

All in all

Although the work doesn’t stop, there’s no need to feel overwhelmed. Plan the process well, stick to the steps and you’ll be well on your way to crafting an effective social media content strategy.

As always, the best of luck!

The Byter Team