If making the most out of your social media presence matters to you, you will want to make sure that you have an actual content strategy in order to do so. You need to have a social media marketing strategy ready.
We know that there is a lot to consider when making a social media content strategy but it does not have to be too difficult of a process. One of the best things about doing this is making sure that you stay on top of social media trends. This will help you a lot, both in the short-term and long-term as well. Let us take a closer look at how exactly you should go about developing an effective social media content strategy for your business.
Content Strategy for Social Media
Set Goals
Making sure that you have measurable goals is of the utmost importance in almost everything. Social media is no exception in this regard as well. This is why you need to be able to understand what exactly you need from social media. The number of goals you choose is completely up to you. Some common goals include the following:
- Upping brand awareness
- Upholding the reputation of the brand
- Make sure that traffic is directed to your site
- Make sure you are constantly generating leads
- A better understanding of your customer base
- Building a proper community
These are just a few of the examples, there can be a whole lot more goals if you so desire. Every business is different and you will be the person best suited to understand your exact needs.
Target Audience Should be Properly Defined
The second step in creating a proper content strategy for your social media is to properly define your target audience. This process should not be based on any assumptions. It should instead be done based on the data you have at your disposal. Find out and define who your audience is in reality. This will help you a lot in a number of different ways.
Thoroughly Evaluate Your Competitors
After you are done with analyzing your target audience and after you have defined it properly, it is now time to do the same thing with your competitors. You want to be able to see and know how your competitors operate on social media. You need to understand things like the frequency of their posts, the content of their posts, how they engage with followers, etc. Make sure that you also take note of what they are not necessarily doing too well. If you have that knowledge, you will be able to not make the same mistakes.
Platforms and Topics Need To Be Properly Defined
This is another very important thing to take into consideration. You simply cannot be properly active on all platforms. This is because, first of all, there are way too many platforms these days. Secondly, it will never happen that all your target audience will be on all the platforms. As you have conducted research on your target audience, you will be in a position to know exactly what platforms they are engaged in and the ones that you need to target.
Content Calendar
After you have been able to determine what platforms you will be using, it is then time to create a calendar for your social media. This will include things like how often you post, the days you will post, and the time you will be posting.
Once you start doing this, a few things will happen. You will be able to identify any gaps that exist in your schedule. You will also be able to tell if your content is too heavy when it comes to promotions. In other words, it is all about a proper balance so that visitors find your social media presence engaging, interesting, and has just the right balance of sales content.
Create Content, Curate Content
This is where the fun really begins when you start the process of curating and creating content. Make sure that you use your content calendar and something known as the “rule of thirds.” You should aim to create content that will both engage and also inspire the target audience you have.
Assess and Adjust
The final step in making your content strategy is to make sure that it is actually working properly. You need to do this by making sure that you track all the results and use them to further improve your content strategy for social media. There are a whole host of metrics within social media that will help you understand how you are doing, These include:
- Engagement: This is the total number of interactions with the content of your social media divided by the total amount of views the content gets.
- Reach: This is the number of unique views that your content gets. This gives us the ability to tell exactly how far the content you are providing goes into visitors’ feeds.
- Clicks: This is a quite simple term to understand. It simply means the total amount of clicks your content is able to get.
- Likes: Both organic and paid likes should be taken into consideration.
- Sentiment: This measures how the different users are responding to your type of content and also how they are feeling about it.
When you have all of this information in your hands, you will be able to make all the necessary adjustments to your content marketing strategy so that you will be able to utilize it to your maximum potential.
Nicole Ann Pore 
mansoor