If you’ve been posting regularly for your business on your Facebook, X (Twitter), Instagram, and other social media accounts, you’re doing the job of making your brand present in the marketplace in front of your prospects and your customers. That’s an awesome place to be–you’re ahead of many companies, some of whom may be your competitors.

But you also might be realizing that you need to take it to another level. After all, studies show that 55% of people learn about brands from social media, and almost 80% of people make purchases based on online or social media advertisements.

You might be realizing that you need a social media strategy for your brand. The whole idea of it sounds like a lot of work. But it doesn’t need to be.

Over the last two decades, the role of social media in a business strategy has evolved from novel trend to essential element. It’s not simply about keeping a consistent social media presence for your brand. It’s about making that presence resonate with your audience, drive engagement, and foster loyalty. You need to thoroughly understand your audience so you can leverage the right platforms to deliver compelling content to them. Automating your social media content can be key to streamlining that process and ensuring that your brand voice echoes at the right time and place. As we go through the steps of crafting an effective social media strategy, we see how automation can enhance the efficiency and impact of your tactics.

Getting to a Sustainable Social Media Strategy

Creating your social media strategy is like charting your brand’s digital voyage. But the journey isn’t one-size-fits-all. The steps below can help you navigate your own brand’s unique path aligned with its distinct audience, goals, and brand ethos. While they can provide a basic foundation on which to start building your strategy, they are nowhere near exhaustive. Your social media strategy should evolve as your brand grows and the digital landscape shifts. It’s about augmenting your planned strategy with the agility to adapt to new trends and insights. Couple that flexibility with the strategic use of social media automation, and you can shape your brand’s online presence into an engaging and effective tool to grow and connect with your audience.

Tip 1: Understand Your Audience

Understanding your audience involves using any quality data you can get your hands on about their demographics, interests, and online behaviors. Are they young professionals who thrive on LinkedIn, or a more visually-driven crowd that frequents Instagram? Social media automation tools can be invaluable here, offering analytics that reveal audience preferences and behaviors. By analyzing which posts garner the most engagement, or the times when your audience is most active, these tools can help you refine your strategy to suit your audience’s needs. This data-driven approach can help ensure your content connects and engages with your audience on a level that feels personal and relevant.

Tip 2: Set Clear Goals

Your social media goals should align with your broader marketing goals, whether you’re seeking to increase your target’s awareness of your brand, drive traffic to your website, or boost engagement with your customers. Your goals should be SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. A SMART goal example would be aiming to grow your follower count by 20% in six months. Social media automation tools can help you schedule and publish content that’s aligned with your goals, and help you measure your progress. By tracking metrics like engagement rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates, you can see whether your social media efforts are working, and adjust and refine your tactics accordingly.

 

A stylized diagram that outlines the concept of smart goals. In this concept the word smart is an acronym that breaks out into ess for smart, em for measurable, ay for achievable, arr for relevant and tee for time-based.
As with all marketing planning, it pays off to keep your social media strategy goals smart.

Tip 3: Choose the Right Platforms

To have an effective social media strategy, you need to identify where your target audience spends most of their time, and what platforms align best with your brand’s content style and goals. If your brand is visually driven, you should focus primarily on your presence on Instagram and Pinterest. If you’re a B2B company, you might find more value in LinkedIn. Although you may focus more energy on a couple of channels, your social media spread should be wide. Automation tools can help you manage your content on multiple platforms efficiently, and show you which channels yield the most engagement and, ultimately, conversions. As you analyze that data, you can aim more of your resources towards platforms that offer the highest return. When you use the right tools to choose your platforms strategically, you can format a social media presence that’s both targeted and impactful.

Tip 4: Craft Engaging Content

Crafting content that engages with your audience means you tailor it to their interests and preferences in a way that aligns with your brand’s voice and goals. You should be able to design assets like blog posts, images, and videos that get people talking about and sharing your brand. In one example of this, AirBnB addressed the impact that the COVID lockdown had on travel by encouraging customers to use the #GoNear hashtag to promote close-to-home trips. Social media automation tools can give you insights into what content types resonate most with your audience. Automation also helps you schedule posts for optimal times for maximum visibility and engagement, and enables consistent content delivery that maintains audience interest and builds a loyal following. When you use audience data to create innovative content, and automation tools to deploy it, you can engage and amplify your brand’s message effectively across your social media channels.

Three photos illustrate a female user on X celebrating a nearby getaway as part of Air bee en beez hashtag entitled go near.
Starting in 2020–in an example of crafting engaging content–Airbnb sought to mitigate the impact of the COVID lockdown on the travel industry by encouraging users to use the #GoNear hashtag to celebrate close-proximity trips. The campaign helped the travel industry bounce back from a 90% drop in bookings with a 22% YoY increase in spending. The hashtag is still in use in association with Airbnb four years later.

Tip 5: Build Your Content Calendar

This involves planning your content and aligning it with key dates, events, and marketing campaigns. Your content calendar helps you organize your posting schedule in a way that ensures a balanced mix of content types and themes. It’s not just about what to post, but also when to post it. Strategic timing is key to extending your branded content’s reach and engagement rate. Social media automation lets you schedule your posts ahead of time to ensure your content reaches your audience when they’re most active online. These tools can help you understand when it’s best to post based on your audience’s engagement patterns. By effectively using a content calendar and automation tools, you can maintain a steady flow of content that keeps your audience connected with your brand.

Tip 6: Interact with Your Audience

Your social media strategy’s success is rooted in the kind of engagement that creates community and loyalty. This means interacting with your followers through comments, messages, and shares. You enhance engagement with them when you respond promptly to inquiries and feedback, participate in conversations, and acknowledge user-generated content. You can use the time that social media automation tools save you to monitor and respond to the mentions and comments on your platforms. In this way, social automation tools enable you to respond in the kind of personalized ways that foster real engagement. When you balance the efficiency and consistency you get with automation with a personal touch, you hit the sweet spot for converting your audience from followers to brand advocates.

The nail product company Nailboo is represented interacting with a commenter on a post on its Instagram account.
Businesses like nail product retailer Nailboo further their social media strategy by interacting with their audience in comments on their Instagram account.

 

Tip 7: Measure and Adjust Your Strategy

You need to analyze your social media performance against your goals. Key performance indicators (KPIs) that you should track include engagement rates, follower growth, click-through rates, conversion rates, and lots of others. You can use the insights that you get from automation tools to get a full picture of which of your social media content tactics are working and what aren’t. This data lets you fine-tune your strategy and adjust your content, posting schedule, and engagement tactics. Social media is the most agile platform you have—what works today may fizzle out tomorrow. The more you revisit and revise your strategy regularly based on performance data, the more your efforts align with your goals.

The Bottom Line

In conclusion, establishing an effective social media strategy is a dynamic and ongoing process. The seven steps outlined provide a comprehensive framework to start with, but the real power lies in the ability to adapt and evolve. As digital trends shift and audience preferences change, so too should your approach to social media. Integrating automation tools into your tactics is essential to your social media marketing strategy. These tools offer valuable insights and efficiencies, allowing for more strategic decision-making and better resource allocation. Again, the journey just begins as you follow these steps—it’s a continuous cycle of learning, adapting, and growing. By staying flexible, responsive to change, and committed to engaging with your audience, your brand can harness the full potential of social media, turning it into a powerful tool for connection, growth, and success. Learn how dlvr.it posting and scheduling can boost your social media strategy today.