How to Write a Social Media Strategy That Actually Works

Social media strategies are essential for anyone who wants to achieve a goal with their marketing; without one, you are simply posting without purpose. Without a strategy, your social media content will easily become inconsistent, and you’ll fall behind the marketing of your competitors.

When it comes to writing out a strategy, I genuinely believe that the written word is better than the typed word. There have been studies linked to writing by hand that suggest that we remember things better once we write them down. It works for me and many people to write things down, so grab a notebook and pen and let’s get into how to write your social media marketing strategy.

Goals

Firstly, let’s talk about goal setting. I see so many people who write unrealistic goals with their social media marketing, and it quickly leads to feelings of overwhelm and which can lead to burnout and feelings of worthlessness. That’s not what I want for you.

Remember back in school when teachers would harp on and on about “SMART Targets”? I used to think it was just some new buzzword that they had all decided was going to take the world by storm. It wasn’t until I started setting goals for my business that I realised that they were right.

 So, let’s write some SMART targets as our goals. For those of you who don’t recall what SMART stands for, it’s: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.

Although for the purpose of this content, I’m going to reorder them.

Your goals need to be relevant to your business strategy. If your business goal is to increase your brand awareness over the next 12 months, you likely don’t need your social media strategy goal to be about monetising your content. But if you instead focused on increasing your reach, it would support your business goals.

Next, let’s look at “measurable”. We need to be able to measure your goals. So, yes, that does mean looking at your analytics. Sorry about that, but if we don’t measure the goal, we will never know if you accomplish it. So, rather than our goal being “to increase reach”, we can write that we “want to reach 1 million people with our content”. Far more measurable.

Is that goal achievable? Not likely when you are first starting out on social media. So, we need to adjust the number of people we are trying to reach so that it’s still high and a goal to be worked towards, but it’s not so high that it’s unachievable. Why not write we “want to reach 2,000 with our content”; still a high number for a novice, but it’s achievable.

Then, let’s look at the specific part of the instruction… because reaching 2,000 people isn’t enough. We need to know who they are and where they are. So, perhaps we want to refine the goal to something like “reach 2,000 sole traders, entrepreneurs and business decision makers on LinkedIn with our content”.

Now we know who we are targeting and where.

Let’s round it all off with the last element of the SMART acronym: time-bound. To know how to measure our goal, we need to know when we are going to get the measuring stick out. Otherwise, we are looking at our analytics for the sake of it, and, trust me, nobody does that. We look at them to ensure we are hitting our targets.

For me, a social media strategy typically runs for 3 months. This is because social media marketing moves at such a pace that we need to be able to adapt our strategy if something in the market changes. You can always repeat a strategy if it’s working for you and there have been no changes. That makes our example goal: “Over the next three months, we want to reach 2,000 sole traders, entrepreneurs and business decision makers on LinkedIn with our content”

Instantly, we can see that a plan is forming. Just from writing out our goal, we can see so much information about what we are going to do to achieve it.

Planning

Stick to no more than two goals as a maximum in your strategy (otherwise, your messaging can get confused). We then need to think about how we are going to achieve them.

Break down the steps you need to take to achieve your goal. For the example goal I have given above, some of my steps would likely be:

• Send 10 connection requests on LinkedIn per day to people in my target audience
• Post content on my profile regularly that will appeal to my target audience
• Research keywords and content that will give my content greater reach to include in my posts
• Engage with all comments on my posts to increase the reach of my content
• Message new connections to grow relationships and show the algorithms that I am an active user of the platform
• Update my profile to include the keywords I have researched that will be relevant to my audience and ensure that I am being searched for the right reasons
• Review and keep a record of my current reach on LinkedIn

Do you see how quickly and easily we have written a plan for how we are going to achieve our goal?

Once you’ve written out the plan to reach your goals, your strategy has almost completely written itself, as we know what we want to achieve and how we are going to achieve it.

What else to include?

Finally, I would like to look at the factors that will hold me back from achieving my goals. If you notice from the steps I’ve written above, I haven’t written anything unachievable in terms of time commitments. That’s important because when you are running a business, time is your most important commodity.

By naming and writing down the things that will hold you back from achieving your goals, you can start to address them and ensure that they don’t derail your plans.

Once you have these elements written down, you have a strategy that’s built for success.

I genuinely believe that social media marketing with a strategy is simple to do and should be done by every business owner. Stick to these simple steps and you will have a strategy that will work for you: write down your SMART goals, write a plan of how you will achieve them, don’t overstretch yourself and be aware of the pitfalls that can stop you from achieving your goals.

For more help with writing your social media strategy, book a Strategy Call with me today, and I will help you to write yours at a time that suits you.