Creating a Social Media Content Strategy

The first step in any successful social media campaign is creating a content strategy. Social media is an amazing tool for startup businesses because it allows you to reach a large audience by spending little to no money. Finding what works for your business on social media will help you down the road so you can save money before you start spending money on ads and influencers.

Growth Goal

When building your social media presence, you may wonder:

What should I be focusing on? 
How many followers should I have? 
How often should I post? 
What social media is most effective?

A better question to ask is: What is your growth goal? 

There are many factors to consider when measuring ROI on social media, so it’s best to look for key indicators related to what areas you want to grow in. Is your primary goal to increase revenue, find new clients, build brand awareness, or gain press coverage? How you answer that question will change which metrics you should focus on to help you achieve that goal.

If you are hoping to increase revenue, you could focus on how many people are tapping on your website links, as well as setting up social commerce profiles. Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest currently support social commerce– the ability to make purchases within the native social media platform without being redirected to a 3rd party website. If you’re focusing on building brand awareness, you can focus on Impressions and Engagement– how many people are seeing your content and what types of posts do they interact with the most. There is so much data and strategy involved in social media, so decide early on its role in your marketing strategy.

Create an Audience Persona

By imagining who your audience is, you can envision what your target audience wants to see. Understanding your audience’s interests, age, values, and demographics can help you curate valuable content, especially when you are not the target audience. By creating an audience persona, you can not only make better content but developing targeted ads will be even easier. Knowing your audience also allows you to have a better idea of what platforms can reach the most people.

Build a Brand Guide

The way your social media accounts look gives people a feel for your brand personality and values through what colors, typography, voice, and images you use. By setting up a social media brand guide, followers can easily recognize your business when you post simply based on the overall design. Following a brand guide helps to give your platforms a consistent and cohesive look.

Creating a Content Calendar

Stuck on what to post? Build your content around what events are happening in your business. You can build in patterns like weekly blogs, sales, new products, and other regularly occurring events you can tease on social media. By simply writing down what you are doing as a company, it is easier to create content around that. It’s okay if your content schedule isn’t perfect. Some of the best content is spontaneous things that happen, and you can shift existing content around that! Here’s a general example of a content calendar:

Creator Resources

Not knowing where to start? Luckily, there are many free and inexpensive resources! Here are some of my favorites apps/programs that make creating content so much easier:

• Creator Suite/Later – Schedule posts to automatically post for you
• Canva–Graphic design tool to create templates, royalty-free stock images, etc
• Preview – Plan your Instagram feed design
• VSCO – Basic photo filters
• Adobe Lightroom – More advanced photo editing with free/inexpensive options
• Prequel – Video filters

You can learn more about creating a social media strategy by watching our full workshop or downloading this guide. For more information on the services we offer at RevRoad, visit us at our website.