The content you post on social media has the power to turn your brand into a household name and turn your followers into fans. This kind of impact only comes from having a solid social media content strategy. It’s not enough to show up on every platform and sporadically update your audience when you have the time. The way to stand out on social media is to identify specific goals, create valuable posts that align with those goals, and distribute content on the right platforms. Then you can measure your results, and fine-tune your strategy over time.
Identify and set goals
The first step towards a long-term social media strategy is to set your content goals. Having goals in mind will help you start planning out the type of content to create.
This process involves digging deep into your brand values as well as researching your audience.
Plan your social content
Once you’re clear on your goals, it’s time to conduct a social media content audit on the content you’ve created so far. Look at which posts performed well, which ones didn’t and what you posted on each platform. If you’re using a social media management platform like Sprout Social, you can look at all of your social media data and analytics in one place.
Build a content calendar
Once you know what content performs best and you’ve identified your primary goals, it’s time to build a social media content calendar. A calendar will let you take a big-picture approach to social media content planning. It will help you visualize your ideas and organize them in a way that makes the strategy easier to execute. Your content calendar will be a hub for everything you post.
Promote and distribute your content
Your social media strategy goes beyond what you post on your social channels. Planning and publishing your content are only a small percentage of a successful social media strategy. A good strategy involves finding ways to actively distribute your content so that as many people as possible see it. When you establish a content distribution strategy, you’ll set up your posts to be shared more widely.
There are social media tools, like Sprout’s scheduling feature, that make content distribution a no-brainer.
Measure results
The last step to an effective social media content strategy is measuring the results of all of your efforts. Proper tracking is going to be vital to creating a strategy with longevity. Keeping detailed metrics will help you tweak and optimize your plan over time. Ideally, you should analyze your content every month to keep track of what’s working. When analyzing your data, take a top-level view of your content over a given period. Take a look at how each piece of content performed and what variables it had working with it. Assess how well the content contributed to the overall content goals that you set in step one.
Putting it all together
Effectively planning a social media content strategy is an ongoing cycle, but it doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Plan out your process with the ideas above and stick to these essential steps to develop content planning that puts a strategic approach first.