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How to Create a Solid Social Media Strategy (9 Steps)

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Social media is such a powerful tool that can help you grow a personal or business brand. Regular people have been able to amass millions of followers who listen to their advice and buy their products.

But with 3+ billion users on social platforms every month, it’s impossible to stand out without a social media strategy.

We’re going to explain exactly how to develop a social media strategy that you can follow to gain followers over the long term. If you follow your strategy, you’ll know exactly what to post, who your competitors are and even how to track your success.

What is a Social Media Strategy?

Posting randomly, getting lucky and growing a large following on social media rarely works. You’ll find sparse success stories of people who post and go viral, but you want or need to be successful.

Right?

If so, that’s where a social media strategy can help. A strategy gives you clear direction and acts as a blueprint to know:

  • Your target audience
  • Goals
  • Channels to focus on
  • Content you plan on posting
  • How to track performance

You have a big plan for your social media posts, and it’s your strategy that will help you inch closer to your goals. Think of a social media strategy as your blueprint to be sure that your posts and engagement are all done with a purpose in mind.

9 Steps to Creating the Perfect Social Media Strategy

Ready for social media success in 2024? Work your way through our nine-step guide to create a social media strategy that’s aligned with your goals.

1. Identify Your Target Audience 👥

Who are you creating a social media strategy to attract? Your target audience encompasses who you want to reach by:

  • Age
  • Interest
  • Income
  • Gender
  • Occupation

For example, if you sell baby clothes, one group in your target audience may be females between the ages of 20 and 40 who are interested in baby clothes and have an income of $30,000 – $120,000.

Identifying your target audience can be further narrowed down by:

  • Motivation to follow you
  • Location

If you don’t know who your target audience could be, think about the content that you’ll be posting and your goals. Who do you want to follow you? What do you want to provide to this audience?

In the B2B space, you may be targeting buyers in companies that earn $10+ million a year because those are the ones who match your business’s goals best.

Once you have a full understanding of your target audience, it’s time for something that’s a lot of fun: setting your goals.

2. Set Your Goals 🎯

You’re posting for a reason. What is it? You need to have clear goals for your social media that meet all of the SMART requirements:

  • Specific
  • Measurable
  • Achievable
  • Realistic
  • Time-bound

For example, you may want to increase your Instagram followers from 1,000 to 1,500 in six months through various forms of advertising and paid sponsorships.

You may also want to drive 20% more traffic from social to your landing pages and convert users at a rate of 10% in 12 months. While your goals will change over time, they’ll always be a guiding force that keeps you on track.

3. Conduct SEO Research

Search engine optimization (SEO) isn’t just for Google. It may shock a lot of people to realize that you need to take a similar approach to social media. Your posts can be optimized to rank higher in the search results on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and any other social media network that you can name.

You can use a variety of tools to help you with keyword research, but they’re often platform-specific. For example:

If you don’t mind typing in queries on certain platforms, such as Instagram, you may be able to perform manual keyword research. We recommend that you conduct research for:

Keyword and Hashtags

  • Keywords relating to your posts
  • Hashtags that you add to your posts

You’ll want to monitor trends in your niche, too. Trends will help you get a lot of traction if you hop on them early enough. We recommend sprinkling the best keywords naturally into your descriptions, titles or other areas, depending on the channel you’re focusing on.

4. Perform Competitor Research

Every creator has a competitor, even if they’re just building a personal brand. You want to spend a lot of time identifying your competitors. We never recommend copying a competitor’s strategy because it will often backfire on creators.

Instead, use your competitors to learn:

  • What strategies are working for them?
  • What channels are they on most often?
  • How do they engage with their audience?
  • What does their posting schedule look like?
  • What types of content do they post?

Use your competitors as a learning experience to see what’s working and areas that you may be able to capitalize on to grow your following. Take extensive notes on each competitor and try to find gaps in their strategies that you can fill in better.

You may even find that the competition uses different strategies across social channels, which brings us right into our next point.

5. Choose the Right Channels to Focus On ✅

There are so many social media platforms out there. Should you post on all of them? No.

Every platform has its own format or style, so if you try to be everywhere all at once, you can easily overwhelm yourself.

We recommend doing some audience research to find out which platforms your audience uses the most. Focus on 2-3 of these platforms to start. Over time, you can expand to more and grow your reach even further.

Younger demographics tend to spend more time on Instagram and TikTok, while older users focus more on Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and Twitter (X).

6. Create a Master Plan for Your Content

At this stage, you’re ready to create your content. But where do you start? How do you apply all of your research to your content plan?

It’s important to remember that your content should be purposeful, on-brand and appealing to your audience.

If you haven’t done so already, now is the time to identify your niche or the primary topic you want to focus your content on. You can break this overarching niche down into three or four content pillars (themes or topics) that will guide your content.

Identifying your content pillars will ensure that your content is always aligned with your niche and the message you want to send. It will help direct your content creation and focus on important things your audience really cares about, such as problems that need to be solved.

Take the time to really define each pillar. Give each one a name, and start listing out ideas for posts.

Once you have your pillars planned out, you can focus on the actual post planning. To avoid overwhelming yourself, start with a two-week content plan. Let your pillars guide you and lean on your research to narrow down topics that will resonate with your audience.

To stay on track:

  • Create your posts and keep them organized in a scheduling tool or spreadsheet
  • Set aside time to create and edit posts to ensure you stay on track
  • Use a scheduling tool to ensure you post at least a few times a week

You can continue creating content plans for two weeks at a time, or you can expand and start planning a month’s worth of content to really stay ahead of the game.

7. Engage With Your Audience

You have a plan for your content and you’re posting regularly – awesome! But are you just posting and logging off? If so, you could slow your progress.

Remember that social media platforms are all about being social, so make sure that you’re engaging with your audience.

  • Reply to comments and DMs
  • Comment on other people’s content
  • Build relationships with your audience

Engagement is something that you have to work on every single day. Set aside time in your schedule to check your messages, comments and mentions. Respond to as many people as possible and be genuine in your desire to build meaningful relationships with your audience.

Ask people questions. Share your insights. Help when you can, and make it a point to bring past conversations into the present.

As your social media presence grows, you may need to invest in tools that make it easier to engage with everyone from a centralized dashboard.

8. Track Your Performance 🚀

You’ve created your strategy and you’re sure you’re going to kill it. But how can you know this for sure if you’re not tracking your performance?

How can you measure your performance? By tracking key metrics like:

  • Engagement
  • Views or impressions
  • Follower growth

Identify key performance metrics (KPIs) to track based on your individual goals. Let’s say that you want to boost your follower count by 25% in the next four months. You can use either an analytics tool (more on those soon) or native analytics on your social platforms to see if you’re on track to reaching this goal.

We recommend breaking this bigger goal down into smaller monthly goals to monitor your performance more carefully and make adjustments as you go along to stay on track.

In fact, you should take time out every month to review and analyze your growth to see where you’re at and what you can do to improve things.

9. Tweak Your Strategy as Needed

Social media strategies aren’t a set-it-and-forget-it thing. Algorithms and user preferences are always changing, and if you don’t change with them, you’ll fall behind.

As you’re tracking your performance KPIs, make note of areas that aren’t going as well as planned. Has your engagement fallen? Did your views tank last month? What’s the sentiment in your comments and messages? Are your followers positive or negative about your content?

Pinpoint key areas that are underperforming and tweak your strategy to improve them. Continue to monitor and improve on a regular basis to keep your growth trending upward.

What Tools Can Help Me Develop a Social Media Strategy?

You have your strategy nailed down, but how will you get from point A to point B? There are so many social media tools out there that can help you with every step of your strategy.

Here are some of the top ones and what they work best for:

1. Sprout Social – For Overall Social Media Management

Sprout Social aims to be an all-in-one social media management tool. It integrates with all of the top social media platforms, including Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest and Facebook.

If you’re a brand, you can even manage your Facebook, Google My Business and Trustpilot reviews.

Here’s what you can do with Sprout Social:

  • Schedule and publish posts, monitor performance, view analytics and more.
  • Get insights into the best times to publish your posts.
  • Find the best hashtags for your brand or niche.

If you need an overall social media management tool, Sprout Social is a smart choice.

2. HubSpot – For Keyword and Topic Research

Research plays a crucial role in the success of your social media strategy. HubSpot gives you the tools to identify the right keywords and topics to focus on. 

With this tool, you can:

  • Track keywords to focus on the right conversations
  • Publish and schedule posts
  • Find the best times to post based on your unique audience
  • Simplify publishing with AI-powered generators

3. Buffer – For Managing Your Engagement

Followers are important on social media, but engagement is just as important. Your goal is to get as many people to interact with your posts as possible through likes, comments and shares. You should also be engaging with your audience to build meaningful relationships.

With a tool like Buffer, you can easily monitor and manage your engagement by:

  • Responding to all mentions or messages across all channels from a single dashboard
  • View detailed analytics and reports to see how your accounts are performing.

4. Zoho Social – For Performance Insights

Zoho Social equips you with the tools you need to track conversations and measure your performance from one single place.

Get valuable insights that you can use to create better content, boost your engagement rate and expand your following.

Final Thoughts

The right social media strategy can help you expand your reach, boost your engagement and elevate your status to influencer or industry leader. Use the tips above to build your own unique roadmap to success and continue to tweak your plan to stay on the right track.

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