Building a Social Media Content Strategy

Part of your company’s marketing plan should be a comprehensive content strategy. This typically includes an overview of your audience, your company value proposition, voice, brand and offering as well as an identification of different communication methods.

With this in place, why would you need a separate social media content strategy? Your overall content strategy is just that—overall. It must address a myriad of vehicles and content types. This broad scope is important as a starting place but cannot provide the level of detail needed for individual tools.

Granular Consistency

Your company’s brand should be consistently represented in all of your communications but you will naturally develop different angles on your voice to meet the parameters of different communication vehicles. Your Twitter feed should not read like your meta descriptions or landing page content, for example.

A defined approach to social content can ensure that your overall plan is executed appropriately. It will direct your efforts, leading to improved results from your social efforts. A clearly communicated strategy also helps to prevent the damage that can happen when a social post doesn’t quite hit the mark.

Core Components

Your social media content strategy should be consistently applied. Each and every post your company makes on any social platform should be developed with these elements in mind:

• Type

Make sure that your social postings vary in nature. Photos, questions, shares, promotions and news are all good post types. Jokes or funny quips can be used but only if the topic is guaranteed not to offend anyone. Stay away from any political or socially sensitive references, for example.

• Purpose

You do not make social posts simply for the sake of making social posts. You make them to create some sort of response or reaction. Be clear in your mind what you want every post to do. Promotional posts will be geared toward driving sales or leads. Questions will be geared toward driving engagement. Generating traffic to your site is also a common function of social content. If you cannot identify a purpose for a post, you should not make it.

• Metric

Simply because you cannot measure social activity as directly as some other sales or marketing efforts does not mean you should abandon metrics altogether. Track unique visits to your site from social platforms, leads or sales from a specific promotion, the number of new followers or likes and more to keep a pulse on how well your effort is paying off.

Aligning these three features will make your social activity highly targeted and therefore more effective. Avoid the urge to throw the dart with a blindfold on and instead look squarely at your target, aim and then throw.

No Reason Not To

While social media should be fun for your audience, it should be about business for you. If you approach it in any other way, you will be sadly disappointed.  When executed well, social media can strengthen your brand, grow customer loyalty, increase your reach and promote sales.

Understanding the power that social media offers your business, perhaps the question is not why would you create a social content strategy but why wouldn’t you?