How to create an actionable content strategy for social media

Social media is one of the most unpredictable tools that a brand has at its disposal. On the one hand, it is an open platform which allows for direct engagement. Digital marketers have not seen this type of engagement ever before. Conversely, social media is often viewed as an over-saturated platform which is full of relentless noise that can be difficult to see you way through.

The trick to seeing the wood from the trees?

Build a loyal fan base which is part of a circular community within your social media networks. To do this, you want to foster a sense of belonging which brings people back to your company and brand again and again. Through direct interaction is one way of ensuring this outcome, you should be combining this with another strategy, namely a content strategy.

Social media networks support a number of content formats

There has been fast growth in the use of interactive forms, such as carousel ads on Facebook. This flexibility in form (text, image, multi-image, video as well as carousel) gives digital marketers the ability to experiment with a number of types of content in order to gauge how best to attract and engage social media users.

What we’re attempting to say is that if people are the heartbeat of social media, content is the blood. It’s the content that you put out which people see and will respond to. In addition, this content communicates your brand values as well as your company messaging.

Merely producing content and sharing what your produce is no assurance of success. Smart content marketers understand the requirement to align social media with other channels in order to ensure that there is a consistent style of communication with customers as well as the stories that they are telling. This is driven by a clear plan rather than scrabbling each week to find something to share.

The first step in designing your content strategy for social media: Planning

In the planning stage, keep in mind what you have to offer as a company. Present those aspects using the lens of what your clients want. In other words, what is responsible for making your brand special. Present that story together with elements of education, entertainment, inspiration and providing value.

Always ensure that you support your social media content strategy with these concepts. Although it’s tempting always to talk about what you provide, be aware that there’s much more to the conversation than merely information about your brand.

Have a thought to the third-party sources that you may want to include in your social media content. Don’t be hesitant to showcase like-minded (and non-competitive) content that other companies have branded.

The second step in designing your content strategy for social media: Publishing

When you’ve done all of your planning and you have an idea of what your overarching messaging is, draft your content in an organised way and make use of a social media content calendar so that you can visually see what content will be published when.

Here are a few tips for building out a social media content calendar for your business:

• Begin with a social media audit.
• Do a content audit.
• Get familiar with the social network demographics.
• Determine your posting frequency.
• Determine your content ratio.
• Set up a content repository.
• Determine your calendar’s needs.
• Input your content (and establish a process).

The third step in designing your content strategy for social media: Measurement

In order to optimise your social media marketing efforts, measure as much as you can.

Take a high-level view of your data for a specific time period so that you can ascertain which pieces of content performed the best. An essential thing to keep in mind is that various content pieces might have diverse objectives. For example, a meme which is intended to entertain your audience should be judged by how effectively it engaged your audience. This is in contrast to a post which links to a blog post which should be judged by clicks that it gets.

For people who are new to measurements in social media, here are the key performance indicators that we recommend that you track when it comes to analysing the content strategy that you put together for your social media networks:

• Impressions – The number of times that people saw your content.
• Engagements – The number of reactions, comments as well as shares that your content gathers.
• Clicks – The number of times that links in your content are clicked on.

To better anything – in work or life – we need to measure it. Measuring your social media content strategy provides you with the ability to optimise what is working well and allows you to see what content isn’t working well so that you can remove it.

Want to discover more about social media marketing? If so, then we recommend that you do a social media marketing course such as the one that we offer. For more information about how you can register, please follow this link.

How to drive engagements

Short and sweet

Social media is not the place for paragraphs and paragraphs. Keep it short and keep it simple for maximum engagement. Research shows the ideal length for a Facebook post is 40 characters or about 10 words!

Laughter is the best medicine

If you can find a way to bring humour into your copy without taking away from the quality of your product or service – do it! People’s lives are already serious enough, and if it’s in line with your brand personality, then make a joke now and then.

Call them to action

You know what you want your followers to do, but do they? Make sure you have strong, direct calls to action in your social media that will tell people exactly what you want them to do.

Be real and write for your readers

When writing your social media copy, ask yourself, “Would I click on this?” And if the answer is no, you need to change the way you write. Try and put yourself in the reader’s shoes for a moment and think what excites them, then create copy that matches those desires.

And there you have it! Follow these steps, and you’ll be creating copy for your social media that will have your audience engaging in no time!

Three stellar ideas for creating great content

Use free keyword research tools

Search for specific topics and keywords which will inspire you in order help you to create social media content. Some tools will provide you only an essential list of keywords or issues however, in most cases, the fundamental keyword lists are all you need to inspire new social media content ideas that your community will be interested in.

Analyse competitor content by using BuzzSumo

A useful tool in order to find curated content, which you can share, in addition to ideas for new topics to write on is BuzzSumo. This tool permits you to discover the best-performing content on any subject in addition to content that is working for your competitors.

Analysing the content from your competitors can give great insight into popular topics that your target market is interested in. The data that you gather can also point you in the direction of the issues that your competitors may have only briefly dealt it and so show you topics that you can write about in greater detail.

 Set up an RSS feed with Feedly

Feedly is a fantastic tool to help you quickly as well as easily review posts from your favourite RSS feeds and search through the feeds you create with keywords. Feedly allows you to put together lists of websites to follow so that you can remain up to date on:

• Your industry,
• New trends and,
• The keywords which relate to what’s attractive to your target market.

You will discover content suggestions to create new content in addition to valuable content that you can share with your community.

Get in touch with the Digital School of Marketing

Want to discover more about Digital Marketing Courses and social media marketing? If so, then we recommend that you do a social media marketing course such as the one that we offer. For more information about how you can register, please follow this link.