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Social media can be a tough lane to drive through if you don’t know how to shift gears in terms of content from one channel to another. Having an effective social network content strategy will help your brand achieve your overall goals from your social media marketing. If you want to create buzz and show up as a valuable brand, create a strategic, systematic, and scalable social network content strategy.
Get started with these tips, but remember that whatever you do, be human and be thoughtful.
A content strategy refers to a plan to use content (audio, visual, and text) across different social platforms to achieve business objectives. A successful content strategy will attract the target audience, develop trust in the brand, generate leads and keep them (customers) coming back for more even after a purchase.
For instance, if your business objective is increasing brand awareness. To achieve this, implement a social network content strategy that focuses on driving traffic to your social media profiles and your website.
An effective social content strategy is the foundation of the Attract and Delight stages in a buyer’s journey. It enables you to look at the bigger picture when creating content – a step towards a larger goal. Create content that adds value to your end goal and helps you stay on top of things instead of just being present. Your social media marketing won’t bring you bounties without a great content strategy.
Let’s look at some tips for developing a documented social media content strategy that builds businesses.
A solid understanding of your target customers will help you meet your social media goals. You might already know your target audience, but you have to gather real, accurate data to form the best buyer personas. Take a deep dive into your audience metrics. What are their preferences, what they like, when they are the most active, and which social platform they use the most.
You can use Google Analytics or other social media tools like Buzz Sumo and Facebook Page insights to see information about your audience demographics, acquisition channels, content preferences, days and times of the day that trigger most interactions and which content format brings the highest engagement rate. Further, spy on the influencers they follow and the content types that encourage them to know more about a product.
If your business is new and you’re unsure what to post to develop a community, try the 80-20 rule. Create 80% of posts to inform, educate, or entertain your target audience and 20% to directly promote your brand.
You could also try the rule of thirds in your social network content strategy.
One-third of the content should be made to promote business and generate profit.
One-third should contain stories from thought leaders in your industry that connect with your brand/business idea.
One-third of the content should be personal interactions with the audience.
Your social media copy is critical for engaging your audience. It should have your brand voice, tone, and look and feel that tells your brand story. Your social copy must be aligned and remain consistent with your brand’s personality.
Document the voice, tone, and vocabulary you’ll use to communicate on social media to convey your message in an engaging way. For instance, if you own a pet brand, you could use the word ‘pooch’ or ‘doggo’ instead of ‘dog’ in your copy. Take inspiration from your competitors’ tone and voice to find your own – that resonates with your target buyers.
Once you find your tone, create guidelines for copy length, writing style, formatting, colour scheme, and graphics. Decide on:
If you want to add Emojis and how often, you’ll add them.
How long your copy should be for each social media platform.
How you will play around with spelling variations, big or small fonts, or text-only posts and images with texts.
Which colours you’ll use in your graphics and in what proportion.
YouTube introduced the Hero, Hub, Hygiene framework in 2014, which defines three fundamentals of the social content creation strategy.
Hero: The driving element of your storyline – the “Don Draper” of your social network content strategy that strongly influences your success.
Hub: Content you create around the storyline and your main themes but curate from other sources.
Hygiene— renamed to Help: Content consists of practical information about your products/services.
Content curation and repurposing can help you create Hub content and make you a value-offering brand. Good content curation includes sourcing content based on your brand’s objective from quality sources and sharing them on your social accounts. Use Buzzsumo to know which content is trending on social and worth a share.
You can reuse your already published article from your business blog for content repurposing. Just highlight only key takeaways in a Twitter thread, use the full post as a LinkedIn Newsletter, and don’t forget to add your call-to-action either in the middle or end of the article or in the comments of a thread.
As you start implementing your social content strategy, track your results: which strategies are working better than expected and which aren’t. Use this information to re-evaluate your strategy and refine it in real-time.
A creative social content strategy and effective distribution of posts will help your business extend its reach. But it requires everyone in your team to follow the Blueprint, which sometimes becomes intimidating. Let us know the goals you want to gain out of your social media marketing. We’ll help you acquire them and spread your brand influence.
We can offer you a full range of services including graphic design, web design, e-commerce builds and developing digital resources of any level of complexity. We can create both a trendy web design that will cause the “wow-effect” and a well thought-out technological interface.
