Social media is by far the best channel to reach out to your target audience, in huge numbers. Just to give you some context, there were 13.5 new users joining social media every second in 2021. And these numbers are only growing. So undoubtedly, creating content for social media has to be a top priority in every digital marketer’s to-do list. But like all your other content, social media content needs a strategy too. Your social media content strategy is a detailed plan that clearly lays out what content you should create for different social channels, when you should publish, what your goals with each content format are, and so on.
The more detailed your social media strategy is, the easier it is for your team to create content that engages and converts leads. But building a social media content strategy can be tricky. Social media trends and audience preferences change very rapidly. Staying on top of these trends is crucial for staying relevant to your audience and outperforming your competitors. But this also means your content strategy needs to be dynamic and flexible enough to pivot every time a new requirement/trend arises.
To help you with this, here are a few valuable tips for creating a strong social media content strategy and a few tools that can boost your social media marketing efforts.
Table of Contents
Start by setting your goals
With any kind of content strategy, be it blog content strategy or social media, it is always advised to start with goal-setting. When you know why you are creating social media content in the first place, it will be a lot clearer what you need to do. There can be different social media content goals, such as building brand awareness, building a community around your brand, increasing traffic to your website or blog, generating leads, and so on. For every different goal, you will need relevant content aligned with it.
Your social media content marketing goals should also be aligned with your overall marketing goals. Social media content needs to work in conjunction with your overall content marketing strategy. So try to figure out how social media content can help you achieve the broader objectives.
For example, say one of your content marketing goals is to get prospects to download your high-value, authoritative resources. In that case, you need to create social media content that leads users to a blog or resources page. If your bigger goal is to generate more sales, your social media content goal should be to lead people to a product/landing page.
Invest time in research
Even if it is just short posts or a quick video, good Explosive Social media content has to be backed by research. Your social media content strategy needs diligent market and audience research. Find out who your target audience is and which social media platforms they engage most on. Look at what kind of content they usually engage with, and monitor their activities, comments, and discussions. This will help you understand your audience and their preferences better. You will be able to create highly-focused and relatable content, as well as make recommendations they might be interested in.
Research also includes competitor analysis. Look at your competitor’s social media content and how it performs. You can not only build a social media strategy to outshine them but also draw inspiration from their high-performing posts and identify emerging trends/opportunities.
Focus on giving your audience a consistent brand experience
Whether is social media content or blog content or any other, it is extremely important that there is a consistency in the way it looks and feels. Every brand has its own identity, voice, and image. The content you put out on all channels should resonate with your brand voice and identity. Similarly, you cannot use a different tone for every different social channel, say one for Facebook marketing and a different one for your LinkedIn marketing strategy.
For instance, if your content is usually educational and formal, directed at prospects in top leadership say, it has to have that same voice on all your social media accounts too. Your social media content cannot be casual on Facebook and Instagram, just because people often use these platforms for recreation. Or if your brand identity is one that is casual, fun, and quirky, this has to reflect in your social media content too.
Changing your tone on different channels is likely to confuse your audience regarding how to perceive your brand. This eventually leads to lack of trust and lost business. Consistent branding is not limited to your logo or brand colors alone. Your content is very much a part of it too.
Repurpose content to save yourself the effort
A good way to make your social media content strategy more fruitful is by including content repurposing in it. You need to post on social media quite frequently to stay in the public eye. But generating that amount of content is not easy. You neither have the time nor the headspace for it every day. So to save time and effort, try and repurpose some of your existing content to turn them into bite-sized nuggets fit for social media.
Say you have a very well-crafted blog post with a lot of insights and takeaways. You can easily take some of the key points from it and turn it into an attention-grabbing infographic. Or if you have recordings from a webinar you just hosted, you can share snippets from it as Reels or on YouTube to make it more accessible.
Also, use Plagiarism Checker to check the status of your content
This way you can also draw more traffic to your existing, authoritative posts, add value for your social media audience and gain better outcomes with little effort.
Experiment with content formats
With social media, you have a lot of scope to try different content formats. So don’t shy away from experimenting. If you keep posting the same text-heavy posts every day, your followers will probably get bored and you might see the numbers dwindling. Include different content formats in your social media content strategy.
Try newer formats like short-form videos, memes, interactive content, live videos, user-generated content, and such to keep your audience engaged. Find out which formats work best and which don’t. Based on this, you can optimize your content strategy as you go. Also, keep room for more formats that may surface in the future, given the rapidly-changing nature of social media.
Tools to boost your social media content strategy
A good social media content strategy is still incomplete without the right tools to assist your team. You can only make the best out of a strong content strategy when you have the right workforce productivity software to give you the much-needed thrust.
Here are a few must-haves for every content team.
Social Media Analytics Tool
Social Status is a dedicated social media analytics and reporting tool for agencies and brands who need to automate their social media reporting. Social Status supports all the main social media channels including Ads Analytics, competitor analysis and influencer analytics. Reports can be customized and exported in a range of formats including PowerPoint, PDF and XLS.
Social Status provides in-depth full-funnel analytics including reach, impressions, video views, engagements, growth, audience demographics and clicks.
Sotrender
Sotrender is a social media analytics & reporting tool designed to track organic and paid social media performance. To get started, you just need to add selected profiles, and all the data will soon be downloaded and organized into multicolored graphs.
In Sotrender, you can analyze all metrics that are crucial for extending your social media presence. What is more, you can track your results against competitors to refine your social media strategy. This applies to both organic and paid content, as Sotrender enables you to compare campaign results, too, offering more in-depth insights than native solutions.
Content creation and collaboration tools
Narrato
Narrato is a content creation, collaboration and workflow management software that has all the features you would need to create and publish quality content. The platform lets you create impeccable content with optimization suggestions and AI writing, so you can do away with docs, grammar tools, plagiarism checkers and AI writing tools altogether.
You can also save custom templates for content that go on different social media channels. You can add separate fields for text and images in the templates. So your team can easily structure their posts for each channel, leaving no scope for flaws. You can create project-specific style guides to brief your content creators as well.
You can also track the status of all your projects on a content calendar or a workflow board. Collaborating with your team is easy, with on-content comments and messages for sharing feedback. Assign custom roles and access to your team members and freelancers, so that you have better control over who can view/edit which project. There is a freelancer payments management module on Narrator too. All the content you create can be saved under Projects & Folders on the platform, so you don’t need a Drive or a Dropbox anymore.
If you don’t have an in-house content team/creator and rely mostly on freelancers, Narrato also has a content ordering platform. Narrator Marketplace is a freelance content marketplace that hosts quality-vetted freelance writers with specialized skills and expertise in creating content for all channels.
Flick AI Caption Generator
Flick’s AI Caption Generator is a powerful social media management tool that makes it easier for marketers to create content for social media. The tool helps you create captions for social media faster than ever before. To use the tool, all you have to do is enter a topic.
That’s it! The platform will generate captions for you on autopilot so you can use them on various social platforms. It also sticks to the best practices for each platform. Besides caption generation, the Flick AI Caption Generation will help you brainstorm, repurpose blog posts, and schedule social media posts.
Figma
Figma is a visual content collaboration platform where you can create stunning designs for your social media post graphics. The best part about Figma is the FigJam tool, which is the collaboration tool for brainstorming and ideating with your team. You get access to a virtual whiteboard where you post ideas, diagrams, and virtual post-it notes. It is very much like sitting in a meeting room with your team and putting your heads together for ideas.
The platform has a very user-friendly interface, hundreds of templates to choose from and interactive prototypes that you can gather feedback on.
Social media scheduling tool
Hootsuite
Social media scheduling tools like Hootsuite are an absolute necessity in a content marketers tool stack. Hootsuite lets you manage all your social media activities from a single platform. Be it scheduling your posts or maintaining a content library, Hootsuite has everything you could ask for. You can schedule your posts for different social media platforms. It integrates with Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and all other social integrations, including WhatsApp Business API. It also offers insights on the latest trends and audience sentiments that you can cash in on.
Tip: Can’t afford Hootsuite? Here are some of the best Hootsuite alternatives for social media managers who want to take their social media management game to the next level!
Market and audience research tool
Mention
Since research is such an integral part of any social media content strategy, Mention proves to be a very useful tool. It provides audience and brand insights by monitoring thousands of sources from the web. The tool identifies important and relevant conversations that you need to follow, listens to and interprets conversations across social media channels, and helps you build a presence online. You can find out what your audience thinks about your brand, track where your brand has been mentioned, and analyze what is being said about your competitors as well. These insights can be very valuable to your social media content strategy.
Summing up
Creating social media content that actually delivers results is just as elaborate as creating any web content strategy. Success with social media content depends on what you post, how often you post, and how you get your audience to engage with it. Your social media content strategy lays out all of these details, giving your team a direction and a purpose. These tips and tools should help you figure out what your ideal social media content plan is meant to look like.
