Social Media Content Strategy - The Comprehensive Guide For 2023

What Is Social Media Content Strategy?

Did you know that 82% of marketers are actively investing in content marketing, with creating brand awareness as the number one purpose? 

First, it's critical to realize the broad definition of "content." Along with the supporting text in the social media post, it may also incorporate gifs, photos, emojis, videos, blogs, and other content.

If you're struggling to come up with a social media content strategy, it might be because you still need to write one out. 

Planning, creating, and implementing content on various social media platforms is key to success.

Write down your social media objectives, strategies to accomplish them, and metrics you'll monitor to gauge your success.

List your planned and current social media accounts in your marketing strategy and goals tailored to each platform you use. 

Refer to a SMART System

To be able to reach your goals, they need to be:

• Specific – Set clear, concise, and well-defined goals.

• Measurable – Every goal should be measured by at least one metric.

• Attainable – Set realistic expectations that are likely to be met.

• Relevant – The goals you set for your business should help you achieve the company's overall objectives. It will keep you focused and help you measure your progress along the way.

• Time specific – Set a timeframe for each goal, whether a month or a year.

Specific

Start with assessing your current position. For example, how many different social media profiles do you have, what platforms are your priority, and what message do you want to convey to your audience?

Then, write down straightforward goals. For instance, 'I want people to reach more people on social media' is a vague and broad goal. 

Instead, focus on specifics. 'I want to increase my reach on Instagram by 1000 followers' shows what platform you're focusing on and the number you're working on.

Measurable 

Your objective must also be measurable. It will allow you to monitor your success progression and maintain your motivation.

Tracking your progress is a great way to stay on track and motivated as you work towards your goals. 

In addition, seeing your progress can help you stay focused and excited as you get closer to achieving your goals.

For instance, your goal is to make more people subscribe to your newsletter. 

But, once again, you need to be specific for your goal to be measurable. 

Try with 'Decrease the number of people unsubscribing in the next three months.'

Then use metrics and analytics to help you increase your newsletter's delivery, relevance, or growth.

Attainable 

Setting realistic and achievable goals when planning your social media content strategy is essential, as this will help you gauge the necessary amount of work required.

Using data from your past social media campaigns can help set these goals.

For example, 'I want to have 1 million followers on Instagram by next year' is unrealistic, and you may get discouraged if you don't achieve it.

Instead, go with 'Increase Instagram followers by 500 in the next two months'.

Relevant

The goals you set should be beneficial for your business. For example, it can be brand awareness, driving traffic to your website, improving customer service, and so on.

For example, if you are trying to improve community engagement on Instagram, you should monitor likes, comments, and shares.

There are several ways to do so:

• Engagement rate by reach (ERR) – The number of viewers that decided to engage with your content after viewing it. It can be calculated for each post individually or as an overall average.

• Engagement rate by posts (ER post) – It evaluates how frequently your audience interacts with your content.

• Daily engagement rate (Daily ER) – It shows how often your followers interact with your account daily.

Time specific

Every goal that you set must have a target end date. Having an end date for your goal will help keep you accountable and on track to achieve it. 

Without a deadline, it is easy to put off working toward your goal, which can lead to never achieving it.

If your goal is to 'Decrease the number of people unsubscribing in the next three months', then three months is the timeframe for which you will monitor your progress.

How to Create A Social Media Content Strategy: 5 Useful Steps

1. Define your goals

You don't know if your social media approach is practical if you don't have a plan. However, you must establish precise objectives if you want to assess the success of your process. 

Some may include growing your team, attracting more followers, or an engaging community.

Some instances are as follows:

• Increase brand recognition.

• Expanding your audience

• Increase community involvement

• Entice visitors to the website.

• Drive revenue and leads.

2. Know your audience and choose platforms accordingly

Speaking directly to your target audience in a language they use and understand is always preferable.

Building out personas is an excellent method to specify your target demographic for social media. Personas are imagined, detailed profiles of individuals who are part of your target market.

Start by examining your potential clients:

• Demographics (such as age, location, occupation, income, etc.) and 

• Psychographics (behaviors, attitudes, lifestyle preferences, personality types, interests, hobbies, etc.). 

Keep in mind that various platforms appeal to different audiences:

1. Instagram is the leading network for storytelling due to its eye-catching visuals.

As part of your social media content strategy, you may add personality to your brand by showing the human side of your brand, its history, the creation of your products, or your dedication to social good.

Toms is a socially responsible company, and they share their values and missions across platforms.

2. To produce better content, you need to understand what your audience wants to see. For example, Youtube mainly focuses on tutorials/how-to videos, live streams, reaction/opinion videos, etc. 

CS Dojo channel is a popular programming education YouTube channel with 1.8M followers, with a respectable following within its niche.

3. LinkedIn is a professionally-oriented platform, and if that fits your business goals, consider maintaining a profile there, as well.

Adobe's LinkedIn Profile reflects its services with its instructional, research-driven, visual, and motivating posts.

4. TikTok  is the leader in terms of time spent on social media platforms, with an average time of 1,5 hours daily.

Famous Duolingo Owl took TikTok by storm with its humorous and entertaining approach and gained millions of followers. 

There are numerous social media platforms available. Still, choose your social media presence wisely and according to your target audience.

But don't spread yourself too thin. Choose no more than two or three, and focus first on the locations where your target consumer is most active.

3. Create engaging content

There is no need to emphasize how important engaging content is. Whether it is a photo, reel, or gif, your goal is to make people react to it.

Preferably, provide a purpose to each of your social media posts. It could range from:

• Product promotion – Post pictures of your products and people using them.

• Education - Publish articles, blogs, and news about your industry.

• Informing/Updating – Keep your audience up-to-date with new products, ongoing sales, etc.

• Entertainment – Purely fun and engaging content.

Remember that your audience might expect to see certain content on specific platforms—for example, more visual content on Instagram or text-based updates and links on Twitter.

Here are some tips you can follow to make the most of each platform:

• Make sure that you have complete information on each profile – Use your brand's image as a profile picture, complete the bio, and include all the contact information (valid URLs, such as website, link to the store, blog, etc.)

• Find your voice – How you communicate to your audience is very important. Depending on your niche and buyer persona, you can choose friendly, informative, humorous, etc. Be consistent, and make sure to reply to comments or share UGC.

• Stay on top of trends – See what's trending on Instagram or TikTok and recreate the most popular videos. 

• Create a unique hashtag – Brands can use hashtags to get attention and encourage people to share their photos.

• Be consistent with content themes – You could switch between different types of content, like reels, product photos, and user-generated content, while still staying within a specific color scheme.

• Use high-quality images with the correct dimensions for each platform – Invest in a reliable graphic design tool to avoid starting from scratch every time you want to post something. You can easily repurpose any design to fit different media while being brand consistent with colors, fonts, etc.

In 2019, Dove launched #ShowUs project that questions how we perceive beauty. The hashtag was used more than 7 million times in just the first year on YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook.

4. Assemble your content calendar

To organize yourself and schedule your posts, use a content calendar. You'll save a lot of time and will not have a creator’s block if you know what you're going to post in advance.

Plan ahead for national holidays, which always offer beneficial themes for content creation.

Spend some time producing informative, amusing, uplifting, and promotional content. Then, create percentage splits for each platform depending on the target audience and the content that is most appropriate for that platform.

You can use several social media scheduling tools to assist you in organizing forthcoming material in advance to be even more efficient.

Also, don't forget that after you're posted something – your work is not done. 

According to research, 76% of social media users expect a comment response in the first 24 hours.

The bottom line is that you build respect for your brand by being active and engaging with your audience on social media.

5. Review and tweak your social media approach

And the last thing is to evaluate your social media content strategy. Does it work, or do you need to change something?

As we know, the social media game is constantly evolving, and it's mostly trial and error.

Make sure you use most of the metrics and analytics, for example, Instagram Insights, Google Analytics, metrics behind the ad campaigns, etc.

Use this data in your favor and tweak it where needed.

Conclusion

Creating and executing a strong social media content strategy can be challenging.

A well-researched and documented content strategy is the key to success on social media. 

This approach ensures that your material resonates with your target audience, resulting in increased traffic and potential sales. In addition, providing thorough and informative content can build a loyal following that will support your business goals.

But there are also some shortcuts along the way. For example, automation tools can help you with scheduling and publishing posts, and various data-analyzing tools will assist you in understanding the needs of your audience.

And graphic design tools like Glorify can save you time while allowing you to be creative, brand consistent, and organized. 

Here are some key features that will help you execute your social media content strategy:

• Infinite canvas – Keep all your marketing assets in one place, brainstorm, and share ideas with your team members.

• Templates – Choose among hundreds of unique templates suited for various social media platforms.

• Be consistent by applying a Brand kit to all your designs with a click. Create logos, custom palettes, or fonts quickly and easily.

• Background remover for seamlessly removing unwanted backgrounds.

• Smart resize for automatically resizing to various platform requirements.

• Annotate tool for highlighting prominent features of an image.

• Create stunning 3D mockups and mockup scenes with 1M+ models. 

• Customize your images with millions of illustrations, backgrounds, shapes, icons, and effects.

Sign up with Glorify today and discover infinite possibilities for creating stunning images that catch attention.