Developing an Effective Content Strategy for Social Media

The power of social media can turn your brand into a household name and your followers into fans. You can make this kind of impact only when you have a robust Social Media Content Strategy. One way to stand out amongst the crowd is to identify your specific goals, create posts that resonate with your goals and distribute it across the right platforms. You can later measure the results and tune your strategy over time.
Your strategy will depend upon your industry and your audience. However, there are some specific steps that you can follow to develop a plan that can outperform your competitors and help your brand and business grow. Here are those:

1) Identifying Your Goals:

Before you begin, you need to set your content goals for your long-term social media strategy. Having a proper goal in mind help, you plan out the type of content you need to create. For this, you will need to learn more about your brand, its value, and deep research about your audience.
Be clear on your marketing goals and how your content should be serving those goals. Specific marketing goals help you curate more tailor-made content for social media. For example, if your goal is to convert more people into sales from social media, then your strategy should be focusing on incorporating posts that bring them to the landing pages of your product/service.

2) Planning Your Content:

With clear goals set, it is now time to conduct an audit of your social media content. Look at your performing posts and the ones that didn’t perform well and on which platforms. You can analyse the data by exporting each platform’s analytics into a spreadsheet. Audit the content to check whether the content is delivering the results as expected. This audit lets you see what’s working well and how each post is performing on different platforms. And for the underperforming content, look at the language and the tone of the post. Your post should be relevant, should sound like your brand, and the audience should be able to reciprocate with it. Stick to a unique voice and create content that markets your brand authentically. Having an authentic brand voice helps the consumer know you better.

Also, it might be unrealistic to target every social media platform and expect good results from all of them. You might want to allocate your resources to the platforms where your posts are performing well and serve your brand and audience the most.

3) Content Calendar:

Once you have the best performing content in your hand, you can go ahead and build your social media content calendar. With the social media calendar, you will be able to see the bigger picture. You can visualize your ideas and organize them in a way that makes executing your strategy easy. This content calendar will be the hub for everything you post.

When planning your content for the social media calendar, you can experiment by reusing one content across different social media platforms. This way, you can get the most out of it, and check whether the content is performing well. This social media calendar makes it easier for people across different departments to coordinate and work on it, as it is the central point of the plan. Everyone can work toward creating a well-rounded plan.

4) Content Promotion and Distribution:

Planning and publishing the content takes only a small part of your entire content strategy. Actively distributing and helping people find your content makes the majority of the plan. With a content distribution strategy, you will set up your posts to be shared more broadly.

If your website involves active blogging, consider including social media sharing buttons for your audience to share it amongst their followers. You can also engage your audience by asking questions and encourage them to share their answers on your social posts or your blog’s comment section. Recognizing when your audience is active the most on social media will help you reach out to more people. This is one way to optimize the reach of your content. Include hashtags for platforms that support them. Collaborate with bloggers and influencers to further enhance your reach.

5) Measure Results:

A social media strategy is only complete when you actively measure the results of all your efforts. Keeping a watch over how your content is performing will help you optimize your strategy over time. Monthly analysis of your strategy will give you a bird’s-eye view of all your content’s performance. With this data, you can tweak your strategy accordingly and bring in the results you desire.

Conclusion:

Creating an effective social media content strategy is an ongoing process. Planning out your processes and sticking to the essentials can help you develop a robust content plan. You can always take the help of a digital marketing agency, like us at ValueHits, for assistance with your Content Strategy. ValueHits’ years of expertise does become beneficial when it comes to creating the right content plan for your brand. To know more, give us a call at +91 22 40500600 or visit our website.