Imagine you are working at a new company that decides to hop on the trend and start a social media account. You sit down with your team next, create the accounts and decide you are ready to start posting.
But wait! The real question is, what are you planning to post? And how do you plan to engage your audience and promote brand awareness through your content?
In order to create effective content, you need a social media plan to get you started. Let’s look at some of the steps you need to take in order to start creating a strategy for your social media accounts.
Photo Credit: Vecteezy
The first important step is to identify your target audience. As we learned in our week 6 reading, identify the topics and types of content your target audience would be interested in. You don’t want to just do this once, but rather you want to revisit this step and always keep it in mind when creating social media goals and planning out your content strategy.
The next step is to brainstorm social media content that fits your goals, and decide which platform it’s best suited for. As we learned through our guest speaker Brooke Ihnattt, she mentioned that each platform has its own strengths. For example, she works at AMEX and as a strategist, she understood that social media should not be treated as a dumping ground for posts. Instead, she took the time to understand what each platform offered and analyzed how her target audience best interacted with its content. For AMEX, we learned that they used Twitter as a business channel, Instagram as a lifestyle-focused channel, and Facebook as a tool to build community. As we can see in Brooke’s case, we learned that there needs to be a strategy behind posting on social media and each channel plays a unique role in building brand awareness, increasing engagement and building brand loyalty.
Our final step is to create a social media calendar to keep you organized and on top of your posts. As we also learned in our week 6 reading, a social media calendar is a detailed overview of your upcoming social media posts. They typically include the image/video file, links, tags, information on which platform it will be published and when it will go live. It’s a great idea for strategists to utilize a social media calendar as it helps you plan ahead and helps you remember when to post important content for specific events or launches. Your social media calendar should also follow to 80-20 rule and as we learned in our reading, it basically means that 80% of your content should aim to inform, educate or entertain your audience. The 20% however should focus on promoting your business and what it has to offer. Once you plan that out, you should decide which social media platform suits the content, and reach the maximum amount of engagement.
Photo Credit: Sprout Social
But wait! It doesn’t end there. After completing those steps, make sure to analyze the analytics and see how your content is doing. Ask yourself…is it successful? Has it reached my objective? If it’s a yes, that’s amazing! You are on the right track. However, if you feel there is room for important, fear not. It’s a learning process and you just have to tweak your content and make sure it’s posted at the right time, and on the right channel. As I mentioned, it is a learning process and it takes time however once you figure out what works for you, it becomes much easier as the hard work pays off!
Published/Writter By: Brintha Manoharan
Date: October 30th, 2023