Social Media Strategy: 10 Tenets of Social Media Marketing

A social media strategy is a plan that outlines how a company or brand will use social media posts and advertising to achieve its marketing goals. While there’s no firm template for developing such a strategy, all potential social media marketing plans revolve around using various pieces of content to appeal to, entice, and retain current and potential customers. Many social media tools and software are available to make both developing and implementing these strategies as simple as possible.

An effective social media content strategy grants companies the ability to target customers directly in previously impossible ways. People use their social media accounts to reveal their personalities, desires, likes, dislikes, and more. Companies can cater their own social media presences to appeal to users based on their data.

Additionally, suppose your company hopes to target millennials and Generation Z. In that case, social media platforms are perhaps the most effective marketing channels available to you since those demographics are heavy users of social media.

Here are ten steps necessary to the development of an effective social media marketing strategy:

1. 1. Assess different platforms’ strengths. Various social platforms have different strengths and weaknesses. The best social media platform for posting video content is probably not the best place to post long-form text content. Different social media formats also appeal to different demographics. Ask yourself who your audience is, what kind of content they like, and through which social media platform you can best reach them.
2. 2. Decide on core metrics. Different social media strategies emphasize different social media metrics. Establish key performance indicators (KPIs) you think will best display whether you’re reaching your goals. Some companies might focus on click-through rates, or how often people click on ads or other types of content. Others might focus on getting users to head to an e-commerce landing page to buy a product (called conversions). No matter the goal, monitor your overall engagement rate in a host of ways—there are a wide array of metrics to discern how often social media users see or interact with your content.
3. 3. Establish a brand voice. Maintain a consistent brand voice through all of your social media campaigns. Work with your team members to decide what sort of voice and tone would appeal to your target audience—for example, some people enjoy conversational brands, while others prefer more formal ones. Posting content in the same voice makes all your social media activity feel more consistent and familiar to your customers.
4. 4. Expand your reach. Expand your reach to new customers and increase brand awareness whenever possible. Use social listening (observing how often users mention brands) to determine how your competitors generate more social media engagement. Find ways to incentivize and encourage your current followers to share your content to their social media networks. Combine this user-generated content with occasional paid advertising to create a more holistic social strategy.
5. 5. Experiment with content types. Curate and create different types of content to see which resonates with your audience. You won’t know which kinds of content ideas are most appealing until you experiment with different ones. For example, you might find infographics lead to sales more often than video content, or vice versa. The sooner you determine which type of content most appeals to your followers, the sooner you can realize its potential to generate a high return on investment (ROI).
6. 6. Know your target audience. Develop hypothetical buyer personas to define your ideal customers as you conduct case studies to identify your actual current audience. Great content creation relies on an intimate knowledge of what makes your social media followers tick. When you appeal to their unique sensibilities, they’re more likely to repost your content—and reposting acts as a word-of-mouth referral to their networks in the digital age.
7. 7. Review the strategy regularly. Keep an open mind about your social media strategy and go back to the drawing board when necessary. Ask yourself regularly whether your current strategy meets all your social media goals and try new things to optimize accordingly. As an example, if a hashtag-centered strategy doesn’t seem to be yielding results, consider switching to a more influencer-focused alternative or vice versa.
8. 8. Set concrete business goals. Simply defined and well-crafted business objectives will help you decide on the best plan of attack for your social media channels. Rather than set goals as broad as “create quality content,” define your objectives in more concrete terms—for example: “drive traffic to our company podcast through video ads at a twenty percent higher rate than last month.” The more specific these individual goals, the more likely you’ll develop a quality marketing strategy all around.
9. 9. Share content at the right time. Know when brand advocacy is most effective for your followers in real time. Use social media analytics tools to identify high-traffic times so you can post your marketing campaigns when they’re likely to attract the most eyes. This method ensures your content curation and other social media efforts are as effective as possible in real time.
10. 10. Utilize social media management tools. Look into apps and software to help manage your social media content marketing strategy. These sorts of programs can assist with automation for time-consuming and tedious tasks like scheduling posts on an array of platforms. They can also grant you insight into good search engine optimization (SEO) terms to use in your content and help you plan a social media content calendar for months ahead of time.

Learn more about advertising and creativity from Jeff Goodby & Rich Silverstein. Break rules, change minds, and create the best work of your life with the MasterClass Annual Membership.