Are you interested in creating your own social media strategy, or simply curious about the process behind it? Social media can be incredibly time-consuming, so having a well-defined strategy is essential to ensure your efforts lead to meaningful results.
What does world-class and best practice look like in social media strategy? I’m always researching the latest trends, guides, and resources to stay ahead of the curve. After exploring a wide range of articles, blogs, videos, and podcasts on the topic, one resource that consistently stands out is the comprehensive social media strategy guide from award winning NP Digital. As a globally recognised, award-winning performance marketing agency based in the USA, their insights reflect the best practices from top professionals worldwide, offering actionable steps that drive real success. Neil Patel, the CEO of NP Digital has produced a helpful 8 minute video that breaks down creating a social media strategy into an easy, practical and SMART formula. Here it is summarised with added commentary and links to some useful marketing tools:
- Set your goals and make them SMART goals i.e. specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and time-bound. Think about how these goals can relate to and benefit your ideal audience e.g. to gain more website traffic from a particular audience to a specific landing page to increase registrations for a specific event, product or service etc.
- Select the most appropriate social media channels to help achieve your goals.
- Do a social media audit – focus on what’s going well that you can do more of; including an understanding of the most engaging types of social media posts as well as the most effective days, times and frequency of posts.
- Create a profile of your ideal audience that’s relevant to your brand, values, and products or services.
- Understand your competitors. Research, what, where, when, how and for whom they are doing much better. How can you emulate this?
- Create lists of content ideas that work best for each social media channel.
- Create a content calendar and seasonal marketing tactics. Manage implementation of social media posts using a project managing tool like Notion.com or Monday.com and graphic design tool like Canva.
- Use a social media planning tool like Hootsuite to implement, track and analyse your efforts. Review all of the above elements of your documented social media strategy once or twice a year; and focus on improving your efforts.
For an even more in-depth guide, take a look at Hootsuite’s social media strategy article that also has videos and free templates.
Social media strategy, planning, creation, and meaningful two-way conversations between your brand and ideal audience requires time, skill, and expertise. If you don’t have the time, inclination, or aren’t sure where to start, feel free to get in touch. Let’s chat about how I can help you craft a social media strategy and then take a hands-on approach to drive tangible results.
[ Photo by Andrea Piacquadio ]