How to Build an Effective Social Media Strategy in 2022

Looking to build a social media strategy that drives your business or personal brand’s narrative to the next level?

Well, you’re off to a great start.

In this blog, I’ll share the process of building a social media strategy that helps you start off on the right foot. So let’s grab a cup of coffee as it’s going to be a very long, cheesy piece of content.

We all are well aware of the importance of social media strategy, but very few of us are actually able to stand out from all the social media noise. The reason is that many of us don’t succeed in focusing only on the things that serve our goals.

A 7-Step Guide to Build a Successful Social Media Strategy

Let me walk you through the process of building a winning social media strategy that’s targeted towards achieving your company goals.

Also, read How to Build an Accomplished Social Media Team for Your Agency

1. Build a Marketing Persona

Suppose you’re a clothing brand named LA LUSH that designs female wedding dresses in Los Angeles. So you’ll cut through the male population altogether while reaching out to the audience – in fact, you’ll eye unmarried females aged 20 to 40 that might be getting married sooner or later. It’s your marketing persona.

Social media is a crowded space. From hip hop artists to car mechanics, everyone is on board. You have to sift through the crowd and pave the way to reach the right people. In other words, you must have a buyer persona in mind that would lead to identifying the prospective audience. 

To build the marketing persona for your brand, you have to work on the following things:

Identification of Target Audience

Create an ideal audience in mind to ensure that you aren’t performing in front of an empty hall or the wrong audience. Once you have a market segment to reach out to, it gets easier to strategize and put things into action.

When it comes to the identification of the target audience, the following demographics play a huge role:

• Gender
• Age
• Income
• Location

When brands have clarity in their target audience identification, they run smooth social media marketing campaigns – from creating content to running online ads, the clarity infuses into everything a brand does to build relations and market the product on social media.

Honing the Narrative

To crush the social media game, you must know that it’s necessary to build and follow the brand’s narrative. It’s impossible to get the desired results from social media if a clear narrative of the brand isn’t in place. It’s highly unlikely that a brand could build the marketing persona without clarifying the narrative.

 A brand’s narrative may involve:

• The “Why” of the brand
• The value proposition of the products
• Unique selling point (USP)

Honing the narrative explains that everything the brand does or believes in must be clear to everyone on the team – the coherence among the team members helps strengthen the process of building a marketing persona.

The whole point of discussing the marketing persona is that if a brand starts social media marketing right off the bat without paying close attention to the key ingredients of social media strategy, then the results won’t be prosperous.

Marketing personas are fictional ideal customers that help simplify the social media strategy when brands know who they should be targeting and why.

Related Read: Social Media Marketing for Restaurants

2. Set Social Media Marketing Goals

This is especially important for B2B brands that are just dipping their toes into the social media waters. It’s important to make sure you have a clear understanding of your goals before diving in. 

Setting realistic and measurable goals will steer your social media content strategy in the right direction. Determine what it is you want to accomplish, and then create a content strategy that helps you achieve those goals.

Below are some of the common social media marketing goals. 

• Increase Brand Awareness
• Grow Your Audience
• Generate Sales and Leads
• Grow Social Media Engagement
• Drive Traffic to Your Site
• Improved Social Media Customer Service

Once you know what your goals are, it’s time to start tracking them. There are plenty of ways to measure your success across each platform.

For example, Facebook Insights is great for tracking reach and engagement on posts as well as traffic to external website URLs. Similarly, Twitter Analytics can help you track impressions and engagement on tweets, retweets, favorites, and link clicks.

3. Choose the Right Social Media Platforms

To lay down a solid foundation for your social media strategy, you must opt for a select number of social media platforms that are ideal for reaching your potential audience. Of course, you can’t be on a dozen social networks just because they exist. This is one of the biggest misconceptions among social media users, especially those who are new and trying the crush it. 

Below are some tips that’ll help you choose the right social media platform for your business:

• Choose a social media platform according to your business type
• Find out where your prospective audience exists
• Take a look at the competitors’ social media (see where they have a maximum audience)
• Look at the content form your audience may like to consume, such as video, audio, or visuals
• Take a look at the comparison of how the audience normally responds on either platform
• Try different social media platforms: Test, Analyze, and Repeat
• Don’t overlook your strengths and skills, for example, if you’re good at videos, use YouTube

Tip: Just opt for two or three social media platforms that suit your brand.

The ultimate goal isn’t to hop on to every social media network. Instead, the purpose should be hanging out somewhere you belong.

4. Create an Effective Content Strategy

Creating engaging content on social media gives us a chance to help out others through our ideas, suggestions, and knowledge. It gives us the leverage, and thus the engagement begins between the brand and the audience.

Creating an effective content strategy is one of the essentials of building a social media strategy. If you don’t know what types of content you’re going to share on social media, there is no point in using the social platforms. 

The idea here is that if your objective is to get traffic to your website, then creating interactive posts on which you get lots of engagement but no website traffic is useless.

Also, you have to create content that your audience appreciates and helps you communicate with the audience.

An important part of building a winning social media content plan is that you have to identify the right content for the right platforms. For example, you can’t keep sharing testimonials on Facebook if your audience doesn’t appreciate it. You have to find the right mix of content for each social media platform. 

The first step of creating a successful social media content strategy is by creating a content calendar that guides you through the process of social media content creation. 

Related Read: Social Media Algorithms 2022: Updates & Tips by Platform

5. Engage Audience to Deliver Value

Once you’ve established your presence on social media, which means you have figured out the audience to target and the social media platforms to use, then start delivering value.

If you’re not delivering value:

• Followers may start to drop
• Most of the audience would forget you within a few weeks
• You don’t get to build a connection with the audience
• Your interaction drops off on social media

There are five essential elements of engaging the audience to deliver value on social media. Let’s take a look:

1) How informed is the audience about the engagement? Are you trying to communicate out of the blue, or you’ve informed the audience about the content that they might see? The point is, whether it’s a Facebook live or Twitter chat, the audience should be up-to-date with the plan.

2) Do they know where you hang out most of the times? It’s imperative to have a connection so that they know where they can find you whenever there is a possibility of interaction. Moreover, platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter are popular for social media updates, but it still depends on the brand and what platforms it prefers.

3) What do they expect to receive from you? It’s important to have a clear communication channel to help guide the audience about the service or product. If the followers aren’t sure what you do; they’re likely to unfollow at some point or may not interact with you ever. So, you can use your cover picture, display picture, bio, and URL to explain what your company does.

4) What value are you bringing to the table? It matters a lot to the audience how, where, and when you’re helping them. A lot of companies like Ahrefs, SEMrush, and Buffer use their official blogs alongside their social media channels to help, engage, and deliver value to the audience. Every brand is different, so is their strength. Use whatever social platforms, content type, and resources you’ve chosen to get the job done.

5) How are they responding to your stuff? It’s important to understand whether your content, efforts, and strategies are helping the audience or not. There could be different metrics to find that out. For instance, growing followers and engagement could be a point to note down. Check your Facebook mentions, Twitter Interactions, and Instagram comments to find out what’s happening at a glance.

6. Analyze the Feedback

When you’ve started delivering value to the audience, the job doesn’t finish there. In fact, the next phase begins at this point. The idea is that you must have a system in place through which you could analyze the performance of your social media activity.

Let’s cut to the chase and see three things you can do to sync with the social media results and analyze what’s going on:

1) Pay attention to the comments:

One of the important aspects of feedback is that you get to hear what others think about your work. However, it could blow things off sometimes, but most of the times, you get to hear encouraging and positive things, which ultimately help you get better at your craft. If you haven’t paid attention to your comments on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram, then you should start doing it now. If you aren’t getting comments at all, then you must encourage people to comment and leave their feedback underneath your content.

2) Look at the shareability:

People share content on social media if they feel connected with you or they extremely like what they just consumed or they want to help others. The more they share, the better. If people are sharing your content; continue creating that type of content. On the flip side, if they aren’t sharing, then try to understand the problem. Try to use ContentIdeas for finding the popular content on social media.

3) Assess the relationship-building:

Analyze the relations both qualitatively and quantitatively. For example, if a blog post gets ranked high in the search engine, not only you get to see lots of visitors, but you also see social shares and comments. Thus, it leads to relationship building.

7. Analyze the Performance

Being aware of the nuances of your social media metrics is a great plus. It doesn’t mean that I’m encouraging you to ponder on the number of your likes, shares, and followers – on the contrary, you should focus on understanding your brand’s strength and the target audience’s needs. It may require a subtle mindset to get along because you might want to build your fan base from scratch and would have to go all the way up by taking one step at a time.

There will be certain things that will help you analyze the performance of your social media strategy. Here are some of the key performance indicators:

Social Media Insights

You don’t need to do something fancy to get social media insights. Just start looking at the statistics and insights of your social media channels. Facebook page has a tab dedicated to the insights. Go to that option and see what’s happening on your Facebook page.

Similarly, if you go to your Twitter profile, you could see a small tab of impressions on the right side of the page, which tells you how many impressions your tweets have gotten over the specific period.

Don’t get overwhelmed by the process of getting insights into your social media. You would not have to just look at your social media insights to get the whole picture. If you aren’t looking at what others are doing and what’s working for successful brands and social media influencers, you might be missing out on a lot of opportunities.

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ContentStudio Insights

It’s a tool offered by ContentStudio. It shows the performance of your content regarding page views, unique visitors, bounce rate, and other page trackings. The interesting part is that it supports websites and Facebook pages.

Website Tracking

Website tracking could be a vital signal to understand your content’s popularity on social media, especially if you look at the content which is driving traffic from social media to your website or blog. I’d highly recommend keeping an eye on the following website statistics tools:

Google Analytics: It’s the most popular website tracking and analytics tool from Google. You could dig deeper into the details and find out which pages or posts of your website are doing well and what content people are consuming more.

Facebook Pixel: Let’s not forget that the whole point of tracking users’ activities and performance is for understanding their needs and developing better content and social media plan for the future. Facebook Pixel is a small code that you need to put into your website code, and it helps you reach out to those website visitors through Facebook advertising. It’s a tool for remarketing that does play a role in building a social media strategy.

So it’s important to reflect on the insights and statistics before concreting your social media strategy. What it does is that it gives you a perspective to steer the strategy in the right direction.

Conclusion

One of the important reasons for writing this blog post is to ensure that you don’t put your time, energy, and money into social media campaigns without understanding the game and a strong social media strategy. 

Social media isn’t about sharing your blog post over and over again, but rather a medium to build connections with strangers across the globe that seem interesting in your work, words, or wisdom.

One of the takeaways of this blog post is to start PAYING ATTENTION to your brand’s strength and how you can use it to help others. It could give the brand a stage to connect, engage, and sell to audiences that you won’t be able to reach otherwise.

If you start following the steps that I shared, not only will you figure out who you should reach out to, but you will also learn how to engage them and turn a bunch of information seekers into your loyal audience members.

It’s not a quick-buck scheme – social media growth takes time.