How To Create A Social Media Content Strategy

Content is at the heart of social media. “Content is king, and it takes many forms: text, images, photos, videos, and emojis’. But it’s not the individual components that give content a royal stance, it’s the story it tells and the emotions it generates in its audience.

When building your social content strategy, remember that engagement is an integral part of how social media platforms work: The more your content resonates with your audience, the further it will be distributed on the social platform to be seen by more people -- and if you’re lucky, it might even go viral.

There’s never a guarantee your content will go viral, but a structured approach to building your strategy will increase your chances.

 

How to create a social media content strategy for your small business

To make your strategy successful, you should tell a story with your social media content, be ambitious, use automation as your invisible friend and creativity as your magic wand. And above all, maintain your rhythm and consistency throughout the entire process.

Step 1: Define your audience

Before we look at the content itself, we need to consider who it’s for. Your social media audience should correspond to your target market, but it doesn’t have to be limited to just individuals in that market.

Adjacent audiences, or those who can exert an influence on your target market can serve as an entry point to your audience and shouldn’t be overlooked.

A great way to define your target audience for social media is by using personas. Personas are a simplified representation of your target audience with a name as well as geographic, demographic, psychographic, and behavioral characteristics.

A persona is like a sketch of a segment of your audience that you can improve over time.

Make sure to include motivations, interests, fears, and pain points in your persona definitions, and keep your persona(s) in mind every time you shape new content. 

• Use Facebook Audience Insights: Via your The Facebook business page, you’ll have access to free audience insights from Facebook. This tool can help you further define and quantify your target audience.

Step 2: Audit you're existing content

Keeping your audience in mind, it’s time to look at your existing content. This can be quite a challenging and the time-consuming process as it involves identifying all of the articles on your blog, any historical publications on social media, and even content you’ve created for using offline.

If you plan to reuse some of this content, it would be a great idea to organize the content in a repository or a digital asset management tool.

• Find popular content on your blog with Google Analytics: In Google Analytics, go to Behavior > All pages and select a long time frame (for example, one year back) to see the most popular pages on your website. Ignore the homepage and all the static pages on your site, and copy the list of all the popular articles on your website.

• Find popular posts on your Facebook page: Go to Facebook Insights and select Posts to see a list of your posts organized chronologically. You can scroll to see pieces of historical content and extract the most successful posts if you haven’t already identified them elsewhere.

• Crawl your website from the outside: Content audits are often performed in relation with Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and there are a number of tools available to help you with this. For a small website, the Screaming Frog site crawler is free to use (up to 500 URLs). It will allow you to extract all of the URLs your content represents so you can add the list to your content repository. Perhaps you’ve already done an SEO audit to gather some recommendations about your content that you can use as well.

Keep in mind your audience personas as well as the values of your brand. Perhaps you’ve performed a brand audit or detailed the values of your brand in your social media marketing plan or your business plan. Look them up, and qualify your best-performing content against those criteria.

 

Step 3: Define your content themes, topics, and channels

While auditing your content, you may have realized that most of it fell into natural categories corresponding to the themes you most often communicate about. In this step, take the time to define the full range of themes you want to cover.

 You also need to define what social media channels you want to use in your content strategy and what their function will be. Define your primary social media channel as well as a few secondary channels, too, that can piggyback on your primary channel to increase the reach of your communications.

Don’t forget to define the role of your website in your social media content strategy, and create an overview of the themes and topics your content needs to address.

Step 4: Map out your hashtags

With your themes in mind, do some hashtags research. Hashtags are an essential component of social media navigation on Twitter and Instagram, and they have a secondary role on most other social media networks, too.

The next step is to associate various hashtags to each of the themes you identified in the last step. Focus on the ones that can drive discovery, and analyze the reach and consistency of each of them. You should end up with a prioritized list of hashtags you should be used for new posts on each topic.

To check the consistency of a hashtag, simply search for it and look at the results. The social media management tool you’re using might be also able to provide this functionality. Keep a number of hashtags on your list so you can vary the audiences you target from time to time.

Use restraint with hashtags, though: A good limit to respect is 3-5 hashtags per post, allowing you to use events or discovery, context, and an anchor.