Social media strategy for business

Social media is a lot of fun, that’s why millions of us flock to our favourite platforms multiple times a day.

But to get real results online it’s best to develop a social media strategy for your business.

Every post you make is part of your sales funnel and has a potential role to play in growing your audience. Creating brand awareness, growing interest, getting conversions and building community. A feel good inspo post can double as brand awareness. A great product shot, backed up with a compelling caption could finally encourage a long-time follower to convert.

But knowing what to post, where to post it and when isn’t always easy. And what works for one business often doesn’t work for all. You could easily sink hours into planning and posting beautiful looking content that doesn’t contribute to your marketing goals.

Your strategy will grow and develop over time as your business does but to get you started here are our 9 steps for developing a social media strategy for your business.

9 Steps for developing a social media strategy for your business.

1. Identify which platforms you should be on

Many of the social media platforms can feel very similar, but the devil is in the details. The subtle differences between each platform greatly influence the way people interact with the site, your content and each other. Some sites attract certain demographics and each favours particular types of media.

For example, a clothing brand will have a much more engaged audience on Instagram than Twitter. And Facebook is for Boomers 🤭

2. Develop a content strategy

Simply posting content for the sake of content won’t get you far. A complete content strategy will outline how you can:

3. Maximise ROI

Content creation takes time and money. You can maximise the return on your investment by planning how and when to share across your social media channels for maximum efficiency and effectiveness. Without boring your followers.

4. Save Time

It can be genuinely exhausting constantly searching for things to post. When you properly understand your product, niche and goals you can develop ‘content pillars’, identifying the types of content you need to be posting and subject matter that relates to your business. With these content pillars in place you’ll have an easy reference guide for what to create/ post and when.

5. Be Strategic

You’ve done some research and discovered mummy blogger content is hugely trendy, so you’re tempted to capitalise on a hot market. However, if your product is artisanal whiskey you’re probably not going to get many results targeting mums any old time of the year. But a targeted promotion around father’s day, that’s another story.

6. Get Results

Each of your posts should have a purpose, pulling your audience further down the sales funnel. Not every post can be a hard sales pitch, that feels inauthentic and exhausts your followers. Instead, plan out content that targets people at every stage of the sale funnel.

7. Create a posting schedule

When to post is a huge question and the answers are constantly changing. Ultimately what works for one business won’t work for everyone, with a little experimentation and research you can identify when your ideal follower is active and what kind of content they respond to.

8. Take a consistent approach to content creation

Consistency and quality are key when it comes to social media but burnout is very possible when you constantly have to think of things to post. Having a content strategy and posting schedule is a great start, but where does the content come from? Depending on the size of your business your content may naturally follow along with your marketing strategy and current campaign/s. For smaller businesses you may need to actively identify promotional opportunities through research and make an effort to create regular content accordingly.

9. Research

Reviewing your analytics to seeing what’s performing well with your audience and when is a great start. Followed by researching trends in your industry and across the social sphere as a whole. For example Reels are exploding on Instagram right now, so you might want to focus on less photography and more short format video.

10. Planning.

Plan out what you’d like to/ need to post according to your content pillars and sales funnel. Organise any photo/ video shoots in advance and aim to catch multiple content formats in one session. For example one product shoot could also become a blog article, campaign video, behind the scenes (BTS) video and several weeks of posts, stories or reels. You don’t want to finish the shoot then kick yourself for not filming BTS content, plan it out ahead of time!

11. Photography/ Videography.

Modern smartphones can capture high quality photos and video, so for the small business they can be perfectly adequate for your needs. But by investing in a photographer or videographer you’ll not only be getting high quality content but also their artistic eye and creative expertise.

12. Automate.

With content on hand, a strategy in place and a schedule to follow all that’s left to do is post! This may sound like the easy part but you don’t want to have to be glued to your phone. By setting up automated posting your well-executed content reaches your ideal audience at the right times, without you having to think about it. Many social media platforms now have built in options for scheduling e.g. Facebook Business Suite for Facebook and Instagram. Or you can utilise one of the many third-party apps available e.g. Hootsuite, Buffer, Planoly.

13. Social Media Management.

Social media is by definition social so connecting with your audience genuinely and consistently is incredibly important. This doesn’t mean you have to be online all the time. Your followers will be most active immediately following a new post so if you’re available within that first hour to reply to comments, DM’s or story reacts you’ll be building community and improving your ranking at the same time.

And there you have it, 9 steps to develop a social media strategy for your business. If you’re still not sure where to start, or you’ve given it a go and things still don’t seem to be working for you, that’s okay! Get in touch and we’ll be more than happy to help review your social media and work with you to get the results you’re looking for.