All successful social media campaigns start with careful planning.
That’s why—rather than just jumping straight in and winging it—your first step should be to put together a social media marketing strategy.
A social media marketing strategy is a planning document that outlines what your goals are, the steps you’re going to take to achieve them, and how you’re going to track your progress towards them. It helps to guide your actions and gives you the focus you need to keep on track.
In this comprehensive guide, we’ll be walking you through exactly how to build a social media strategy that drives results.
1. Analyze your current social media performance
Before you can begin to put together your social media strategy plan for the future, you need to think about where you are right now.
If you’ve already been using social media for a while, start by analyzing your efforts so far. The aim is to find out:
- Which strategies are already working well for you and which aren’t?
- Which social media platforms are you seeing the best results from?
- How many followers do you already have on each platform?
- What kind of average engagement rate are you generating on your social posts?
- What does your brand sentiment look like across social media?
- How does your performance compare to your competitors/industry benchmarks?
- Did you meet your goals for last year? If not, what went wrong?
Once you know all the above, you’ll have a better idea of what you need to work on and which platforms you should focus on.
You’ll also know where your ‘starting point’ is. For example, if your average engagement rate on Instagram is below 0.5% (below industry benchmarks), you might want to set a goal to raise that to 1% by the end of this year. We’ll talk more about setting goals next.
How to get started
To analyze your social media performance, it’s worth investing in a social media management tool if you haven’t already.
All-in-one social media management tools like Sendible or SocialBee come with built-in analytics that can help you to keep track of your performance and uncover useful insights.
Use these tools to run your own audit, see how well your content performed compared to your goals for last year, and highlight any areas that you feel could have been more successful or will need to be changed for the coming year.
The great thing about Sendible is that it includes a social media monitoring tool. Alternatively, you could opt for a dedicated tool like Brand24.
Using these tools, you can get an idea of what people are saying about your brand on the web. Not just when you’re tagged or @mentions, but also the times when your brand is mentioned in name only.
This information can then be used to inform your decisions about your social media strategy moving forwards.
2. Set clear goals
Once you’ve accomplished the above, you’ll have a pretty good idea of where you’re at right now in terms of your social media performance. Now, you can start to think about where you want to get to.
An effective social media marketing plan starts with setting clear, measurable goals. Ask yourself this: what exactly do you want from social media?
For example, are you hoping to boost your brand awareness? Drive traffic to your website? Improve customer engagement? Generate quality leads?
Make sure you take the time to nail your goals down now as they’ll form the foundation of your whole social media marketing strategy.
How to get started
When you’re defining your goals, we’d suggest using the goal pyramid. The goal pyramid involves breaking your goals up into three different levels.
At the top of the pyramid, you have your outcome goal. This is the overarching goal — the broad business objectives that you want to achieve and the time by which you hope to achieve them. Outcome goals should always be SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-based:
- Increase your social media followers to 10,000+ in 12 months
- Improve brand sentiment by increasing positive mentions from 40% to 60% by the next quarter.
- Drive 1,000+ page visits from social media per month by next year
Once you have your outcome goal, you can break that down into performance goals. Performance goals occupy the next tier down in the pyramid and are essentially smaller goals that contribute towards the outcome goal.
For example, if your outcome goal is to increase your social media followers to 10,000 or more in a year, some performance goals that could help you to get there might be:
- Post more frequently
- Increase average engagement rate on social posts
- Improve your total number of impressions and reach
Next, you can break that down even further into process goals. These occupy the bottom rung of your pyramid and are highly measurable actions that you have total control over. To find your process goals, ask yourself what you’ll need to do to achieve your performance goals. Sticking with the above example, we might set process goals like:
- Increase post frequency from 2 to 5 social posts per week
- Use at least 3 hashtags on every post to improve reach
- Run at least one social media giveaway per month to improve reach and engagement
3. Identify your KPIs
Data is what drives any good social media strategy. In order to measure progress towards your goals, you need to establish some KPIs (key performance indicators)—important metrics that reveal how well you’re performing.
Your goals should determine which specific KPIs you should be tracking. For example, if your outcome goal is to drive 25% more conversions from social media, you’ll probably want to measure KPIs such as reach, click-through rate, and conversion rates.
Here are some other examples of KPIs you might want to keep track of, depending on your goals:
- Reach / Impressions. These metrics tell you the number of unique viewers who see your posts.
- Engagement rate. You can calculate engagement by dividing the total number of engagements (likes, comments, etc.) by the total number of impressions.
- Likes, comments, shares, etc. In addition to the overall engagement rate, you can also keep track of individual engagement metrics such as likes, comments, shares, and retweets.
- Click-through rate. If you’re using social media to drive traffic to your landing pages, you’ll probably want to measure the click-through rate. This tells you the number of people that click your links as a percentage of overall impressions.
- Brand mentions. This tells you how many times your brand is mentioned on social media. It can help you to get a better idea of brand awareness.
- Brand sentiment. This tells you how people feel about your brand by looking at the context of your brand mentions and whether people are talking about you in a positive, neutral, or negative context.
- Response rate. This metric tells you how many social comments your team is responding to and how fast they’re responding. It may be a useful KPI to track if your goals are customer service-focused
- Share of voice. This tells you how much of the social media landscape your brand occupies compared to your competitors.
How to get started
Again, in order to track KPIs, you’re going to need the right tools. You can do this easily with tools like Iconosquare.
Both come with powerful social media reporting features that can help you to keep track of all your KPIs.
For more ideas, you might want to check out our roundups of the social media analytics and reporting tools or social media management tools.
4. Consider your target audience and choose your platforms
Next, take some time to consider your target audience. Ask yourself this: Who are you trying to reach through your social media marketing efforts?
Different audience segments use different social media platforms. For example, platforms like TikTok are a favorite amongst younger generations of consumers, like Gen Z and Millennials, whereas older users are more likely to use Facebook than other social media platforms.
Meanwhile, Pinterest has a primarily female user base, and LinkedIn has a B2B audience.
And each social network is growing at a different rate.
Once you know who your target demographics are, you can focus your efforts on the social media platforms that they’re most active on.
The important thing here is to look at the data. You can find information about the different demographics that make up each platform’s user base in our statistic roundups:
- General social media statistics
- Facebook statistics
- Instagram statistics
- Twitter statistics
- LinkedIn statistics
- TikTok statistics
It’s also important to factor in how users interact with each of these platforms and how that aligns with your business goals. For example, many people get their news from Facebook and Twitter but prefer platforms like Pinterest or Instagram to find new products.
Again, you can find more information about these user habits in our stats roundups. Factor it all into your decision about which social media platforms to target.
How to get started
Start by putting together a comprehensive target audience/buyer persona. Make sure to include information like their:
- Sex/Gender
- Age
- Location
- Interests
- Average income
- Favorite social media platform
- Preferred type of content
This will all help with planning your social media strategy. If you’re not sure who your target audience is, it can help to look at your existing audience.
5. Plan your content and set brand style guidelines
Now we know what our goals and KPIs are and who we’re targeting, we can start to put together a content plan. Your content plan is probably the most important part of your social media strategy.
It tells you what types of content you’re going to post and provides some general guidelines to help direct your team. Here’s how to put it together.
How to get started
There’s a lot to say about planning content and we don’t have time to cover everything. Instead, we’re just going to outline two of the most important elements that you’ll definitely want to include in your plan.
Content mix
Your content mix refers to the different ‘types’ of content you’re going to be posting. Think about both the format (i.e. text updates, images, stories, short-form or long-form videos, curated content, contests, etc.) and the purpose (informational, educational, promotional, entertaining, etc.).
You might want to use the 80-20 rule, which says that only 20% of your posts should directly promote your brand and the other 80% should be to educate, entertain, or inform.
And of course, aim for a good mix of different post formats to keep things fresh. Make a note of the proportion of posts on each platform you want to be in each format (e.g. on Instagram, you might post 50% images, 20% Reels, and 30% Stories).