Team : Work

With 2.96 billion users on Facebook and 2.35 billion users on Instagram, there are a lot of people using social media for many different purposes. It can feel overwhelming to know where to start.

A social media strategy can help you to narrow down the people and/or groups of people most relevant to your page and the information they care about. A strategy based on audience characteristics and interests allows you to share information more effectively by tailoring specific messaging and content to their interests and how your work and services support their needs. When your content reflects knowledge of your target audience and their needs, this helps social media algorithms to match the right people with your page and posts. Social media strategies take into account up-to-date audience metrics and algorithm insights to identify the best ways to meaningfully reach and engage your audiences, if you know who they are.

Your organization should interact with your target audience on their preferred social media platforms, allowing you to start conversations in more efficient and authentic ways.

Social media strategies distill the information that your target audiences need to hear from you, finding the overlap between the content your audience seeks and the information that your organization seeks to convey. By analyzing the types of content and subjects your audience responds to the most, you can focus on creating content that will fulfill those needs, while also sharing organizational priorities and messaging in a way that will best resonate with your target audience. This will also help you to achieve your set goals, whether it’s acquiring new followers, increasing reach and engagement, or creating a stronger sense of brand identity, awareness, and a general sense of trust and support.

By ensuring that branding and associated imagery is consistent with your brand personality, and creating a tone of voice document that represents who you are and how you want to communicate with your audience, you can continually reinforce who your organization is and what you value with each social post. Branding elements like bio keywords, hashtags, and video strategy can make it easier for your audience to find and join conversations with your organization.

Growing an audience requires a consistent social media presence.

By creating a consistent, reliable presence on social media, you build brand engagement and establish your organization as a primary source of information. A social media strategy can help your organization to create a consistent posting schedule and guidelines for regular two-way conversations.

Your social media strategy should integrate organizational goals into online presence management. This strategy allows you to work backwards, creating quality content that aligns with your organization’s goals and helps fulfill your audience’s needs and interests. It also gives you a benchmark to work towards, allowing you to analyze the results and amend your social media strategy accordingly.

Be prepared to monitor how your strategy and content perform, and continually refine your strategy according to what works best. Be prepared for your strategy to change and evolve over time.

While the initial effort of creating a content calendar and collateral bank can take time, in the long run it will reduce the amount of time spent creating, organizing, and scheduling posts.

In general, the higher the quality of content you put out, the longer of a lifespan it will have. It may take a little while to strike the right balance between frequent posting and quality content, and it’s important to take operational capacity and the time you can devote to social media into account, too.