Billions of people are on social media—many of them several times per day. That’s a whole lot of attention just waiting for your pithy post and clever content.

There are also thousands of brands taking up space in all of those feeds. You’ll need a solid social media strategy to stand out.

In this guide, we’ll show you how to build a social media strategy designed to help your business capture attention, build trust, and convert followers into customers.

What is a social media strategy?

A social media strategy is a plan that outlines how you’ll use social media to support your business objectives. Think of it like a roadmap that defines your destination and lists the routes, people, and tools you’ll use to get there.

Your strategy will answer questions like:

• Which social media platforms will you use?
• How will you target your audience?
• What kinds of content will you publish?
• How will you increase engagement?

If this sounds a little too confining for your creative mind, don’t worry! Social media strategies should be a flexible framework that guides your team but has room to experiment and shift as you learn.

Why create a social media strategy?

We know why marketing on social media is huge. Nearly 90% of the US population is on social media, and about a third of that huge number regularly uses it to discover new products, services, and brands.

But why do you need a strategy for social media marketing? Here are four reasons to consider.

It keeps your work focused on your goals

Social media marketing can be a lot of fun. It’s open to creativity. And you get to interact with people who hopefully share some of your interests.

But it’s important to remember that if you’re using social media to promote your business, the time you spend there should move you toward that objective.

A well-crafted social media strategy is a document you can refer to repeatedly to remind you of the business objectives you set. It’ll also keep you and your team grounded in the plan you made to grow.

Keeps you consistent

Your social media strategy becomes your accountability partner, making sure you post the right content at the right cadence.

When it’s codified in a strategy, your team has guidelines to follow. They’ll be better able to maintain consistency in brand, tone, voice, and visuals.

Plus, you’ll always have an expressed goal for publishing a certain number of times per week or month. That’ll help keep you filling your feed with great content.

Backs your decisions with data

You’ll learn what works best as you gather feedback from your followers. Specifically, you’ll see which type of content they love, when you should post it, and how they want you to engage in replies and comments.

Your strategy is the single source of truth where the insights from that data live. Do your customers prefer video to static image posts? Do contests and giveaways work really well, but only on weekends? All that learning becomes much more useful when you coalesce it into a single document and use it to guide future activities.

Prevents social media mishaps

Nobody wants to deal with a social media crisis. Too often, they happen because someone on the team wasn’t on the same page; they went off script and posted something seemingly innocent that didn’t hit the mark.

A strategy then can also act like a set of guidelines to help anyone who posts on your brand’s behalf maintain the same ethos. Are you political in your messaging? What topics do you focus on? How do you react to competitors? All of that can be included.

How to build a social media strategy for your business

Your strategy doesn’t have to be an in-depth, 100-page document. It can start with just a few components and grow as you try and learn. Here’s how to begin.

Set SMART goals

Before you can draw a map, you need to know where you’re going. That’s where SMART goals come in handy.

The “S” in SMART stands for specific, and that’s what we’ll focus on here. Include in your strategy:

• The metrics that define success: If your goal is to grow your audience and awareness, then views and likes are your main metrics. Need sales? Track conversion metrics.
• Benchmarks: Note where you are now and where you want to be in a set period of time. Your competitors are a good source of benchmarks when starting out, so spy on them at will.

Identify your target audience

Along with success goals, you’ll need to identify your target audience, i.e., the people who you really want to attract with your social media strategy. Gaining a million followers feels good, but if none of them will ever buy what you sell, it’s not going to help our business grow.

A baseline to start with is reviewing common characteristics among your best customers. Note their location, age, job title, interests, buying habits, and other demographics. Use that information to build a basic target audience profile and let it guide other aspects of your strategy. These target audience examples will help.

Choose the best social media platforms

One thing you’ll learn from your target audience is which social media platforms to focus on. For example, if your ideal customers skew older, you may want to invest more heavily in Facebook.

Other factors will play into this decision. For example, if your product is very visual, you’ll lean towards in-feed Instagram posts. If you have explainer or customer testimonial videos, YouTube or TikTok may be better.

Create a content plan and calendar

Here’s where the strategy rubber hits the execution road. With your audience, goals, and platform(s) in mind, plan out what you’ll post and when for next month, quarter, or even the full year.

Not sure where to start? Try the 50/30/20 rule:

• 50% value-focused: Gear half of your social media posts to help your audience understand or do something.
• 30% curated: Repost and share content from other creators for 30% of your plan.
• 20% promotional: Use the last 20% of your posts to promote your products, events, or sales.

Plan for engagement

The magic of social media is the network effect. When you connect with one person, you have a chance to connect with their entire network, and then those’ entire networks, and so on.

You can speed up and amplify the network effect by regularly liking and commenting on posts by other accounts. And, of course, replying to the comments on your posts.

Here’s another cool rule to guide the engagement portion of your social media strategy. It’s called the 5x5x5 rule. There are different versions of it, but the one that works best here is:

• 5 minutes: Spend 5 minutes every day on this strategy.
• 5 likes: Give five posts from other accounts a like (or love, clap, etc.).
• 5 comments: Comment on five posts from other accounts (make them meaningful and additive; empty, performative comments could hurt your brand).

As a bonus, reviewing all that content will spur new ideas for your own account.

Establish regular reporting

You can’t grow what you don’t watch. Make sure to include a plan for when and how you’ll review and report success. That means knowing where you’ll find the metrics from the first step, how you’ll gather and present them, and how often you’ll do it.

For most brands starting out, a quick weekly review of the overall numbers and the top-performing post, followed by a more detailed monthly review, is great.

On top of regular reporting, set a time to complete a full social media audit. It sounds daunting, but it’s pretty easy with the right audit and template. Aim to run an audit once per year.

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