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Social Media Strategy Guide
Social Media Strategy Guide
SOCIAL MEDIA
STRATEGY
GUIDE
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1 Introduction 2 Where
are you now?
3 Setting your Objectives
4 Know your Audience
5 Platform Selection
6 Content types by platform
7 Content Planning
8 Measurement and KPIs
In this guide we will take you through the steps needed to build a
social marketing strategy that is appropriate to your audience and
achieves your business goals.
WHERE ARE
YOU NOW?
The first step in creating a successful and robust social media strategy
is to assess your existing social media efforts and that of your
competitors.
SECTION 2
SETTING YOUR
OBJECTIVES
Like all marketing activity, setting clear objectives is critical to the
success of your social media strategy and if you don’t already have a
social presence, the competitor audit will help to give you a good
benchmark of where you need to be.
Before setting objectives you must first consider WHY you are
planning a social media campaign. Social media activity should be
tactically run to help you solve key challenges facing your business.
For example:
The objectives you set and the tactical approach you take will differ
depending on the challenges you are hoping to solve.
It’s a good idea to really think about how you’ll deliver against each
objective in some detail.
●●Monitor the data analytics of your posts, take note of what drives
click through and what doesn’t and upweight relevant content
accordingly.
●● Keep it brief. Try and entice the reader into wanting more! If you
reveal all the information in the post, there’s no need for them to
visit your website. Notice how other brands and media
publications use concise text to grab the reader’s attention and
prompt click through.
●● Create a clear call to action. Why would the viewer want to click
through to your website? E.g. “Find out how…” or “Sign up
early and…” are giving people a gentle push to take the next
step.
INCREASING BRAND LOYALTY
Turning followers into advocates of your brand is an incredibly
valuable way of getting word-of-mouth marketing.
SECTION 3
SETTING YOUR
OBJECTIVES
Before launching your social media activity or refining your strategy it
is important to fully understand who it is you are trying to connect
with. Who exactly are you speaking to? This is the cornerstone of any
good strategy because once you know the ‘who’, you can determine
‘where’ you should speak to them and ‘what’ you should say. It also
helps you know who to actively target with any promotional activity.
This insight into your audience will help you determine which
platforms you should focus on and what type of content you should
post.
It’s worth bearing in mind that social media platforms are primarily for
people to interact with people and brands that take the human approach
are much better received.
Whatever the tone, it’s important to make sure it’s consistent. Playful
one day and corporate the next won’t appear genuine to your audience.
If you have more than one person managing the social media activity
then make sure they fully understand the tone of voice. A good way is
to make sure the social voice fully reflects the company culture.
SECTION 4
PLATFORM
SELECTION
Once you’ve set your objectives and understand your audience it is
time to select the right platform or platforms for your
communications. To do this you need to understand where each
channel excels and how it can help you at the relevant point in your
customer journey.
If you’re thinking about using more than one social channel, you also
need to consider the type of content people consume within different
channels. A lengthy and informative blog post might work for
LinkedIn, but cross-publishing this onto Twitter may not work so well.
But you can always create a cut-down or visual representation of the
same content.
FACEBOOK
Facebook is the world’s most popular social network with over 1.8
billion users. It is also highly developed for business use, with a huge
‘brand’ population all hosting their own branded pages and a
sophisticated advertising platform.
It might feel like Facebook is old news in the digital world with newer
platforms such as Instagram and Snapchat getting so much attention
from younger audiences, but it’s still huge with nearly 90% of 18-29
year old internet users logging in. It’s also a great platform for reaching
older audiences with 84% of 3049 year olds and 72% of 50-64 year
olds.
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Section 4 – Platform Selection
Tips
●● Optimise: Optimise content to encourage sharing and
engagement. Set a character limit of 150-200 Use Images,
●● video, gifs: Accompany all posts with an image or video to
boost content reach and engagement Links: Link back to the
●● website as often as possible to drive traffic
Promoted posts: Promote important posts to reach a
●● targeted, new audience
Call to Action: Give each post a call to action, however
●● small. This keeps the audience engaged Frequency: Post
consistently, up to once a day. Do not post several times in
●● one day and then not again for a week
TWITTER
Twitter has over 315m users worldwide and is the original
‘micro-blogging’ site with over 500m tweets sent daily. Like Facebook,
twitter is also designed for business use, with its own advertising
platform and wide uptake among brands.
Twitter provides a double benefit to organisations, it allows brands to
engage directly with their audience and also to engage with key
influencers within each target market, such as reporters, social
influencers, prominent individuals in a given field, etc.
Users are also happy to interact with brands on Twitter, with many using
it as a ‘go-to’ for latest brand updates, information and also as a
customer service tool. The Twitter audience responds best to
entertaining and informative content. The best content types to use
Twitter also gives you a useful insight into your prospects personal life,
likes, and interests are. It's a great listening tool and can be a useful tool
for developing your selling strategy.
Tips:
●● Twitter Ads: use Twitter Ads to promote your content to a
targeted audience
●● Hashtags: use relevant hashtags, to categorise your content within
a certain theme. E.g. A travel business might hashtag a relevant
post #summersun and their content would appear under all
#summersun content
●● Monitoring: keyword monitoring and hashtag monitoring are
important to have an eye on what people are saying about your
brand category or similar brands. This will provide an opportunity
for you to proactively pitch your business. It will also allow you
to find content which you might want to share.
●● Short and sweet: keep copy on tweets as punchy as possible,
and always try to leave enough characters for an image. If you
want to post a link and an image, this will take up 46
characters, leaving just 96 for copy. Use images: images
●● boost engagement with the post Optimise images:
●● where possible, optimise images to 1024x512 for
Twitter.
●●
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Section 4 – Platform Selection
LINKEDIN
LinkedIn has over 450 million users worldwide and is the world’s
largest professional social network. Its main purpose is to facilitate
networking between professionals by connecting colleagues with each
other and by connecting businesses to existing and potential
employees. It is also a place where people within an industry can
share ideas and interact via LinkedIn Groups.
The fastest growing demographic on LinkedIn is students and grads so if
you’re looking to reach a young audience then LinkedIn could be a good
option. There are around 20m users in the UK.
Tips:
Instagram can provide strong results for businesses that use it to inspire
and engage their users. However, in order to make this platform work,
you must commit to sharing a frequent stream of high quality, inspiring
and engaging photos and videos.
Working out the best content to post can take a while, so it’s a good idea
to spend some time on the ‘explore’ and ‘following’ tabs to find our what
your followers are engaging with. Relevant hashtags will ensure your
content reaches a wider, relevant audience and the more engagement
your content gets, the more likely it’ll be featured within ‘explore’ which
can expose your posts to a massive audience.
Tips:
PINTEREST
Unlike Twitter and Facebook, which are primarily communicationbased
platforms, Pinterest has a strong commercial element and *55% of
Pinterest users visit the platform to find or shop for products. *KPCB
Internet Trends report 2016
If you have an online shop, then Pinterest could be a really strong tool for
driving web traffic and is definitely worthy of consideration.
Tips:
●● Post compelling images that people will want to share Try text
●● overlays to help people browse and discover your content faster
Add the Pin it Button to your website for people to easily
●● save ideas and products to Pinterest Create
detailed descriptions of your content
●● Create themed boards. E.g. If you’ve got a new product design or
●● logo to launch Pinterest allows you to connect written, photo, and
video content under one heading. (Pins created for themed boards should
also make sense on their own so people can re-pin)
●● Besides the Pin It button, you can also add a Follow button in a
prominent position on your webpage so your customers can easily
find you
●● Consider adding lists or how-tos in the text overlay
SECTION 5
CONTENT TYPES
BY PLATFORM
FACEBOOK
●● Exclusive offer codes e.g. “receive 10% when you book online
using the code xxx.”
●● Regular competitions to engage the audience
●● Brand related news stories and stories
●● Brand category related news and stories
●● Photos, gifs, video, infographics
●● User generated content (UGC) – customer stories, engagements,
good feedback etc.
●● Being aware of key dates and using events to tap into
seasonal/trending content. E.g. summer holidays, bank holidays,
Valentine’s Day etc.
●● Sharing other relevant content from Facebook or other channels
TWITTER
●● Sharing blog posts to drive traffic to your website
●● Re-tweeting followers and following images/tweets
●● Sharing interesting content about your brand / category
(shareable content)
●● Promoting Instagram images through Twitter
●● YouTube videos / Discount codes / Competitions
●● Promotions
●● Creating content around trending topics (using relevant
Hashtags)
INSTAGRAM
●● High quality shots and videos
●● User generated content (UGC) re-posting content from your
existing followers will increase brand favourability
●● Hashtags are key to using Instagram successfully and relevant,
popular hashtags must be used to accompany the posts
LINKEDIN
●● Publish owned articles and articles from credible sources.
●● Industry insights, brand category and business insights.
●● Share good news (business-focused, awards etc).
●● Avoid being ‘salesy’ and avoid anything overly political or
controversial.
●● Maintain a professional tone of voice – this isn’t quite the same
as Facebook so it’s good to have a more business approach.
●● Share other people’s articles from Linked In Pulse (a collection
of publishers content)
PINTEREST
●● Instructographics (or infographics) are useful because of their
DIY, how-to nature.
●● Rich Pins: There are four different types:
●● Product Pins – Real-time pricing, availability and info on
where to buy your product.
●● App pins - so people can download your app without leaving
Pinterest.
●● Recipe pins - ingredients, cooking times and serving sizes.
Article pins - a headline, author and story description. Board
●● names should be engaging and reflect the personality of your
●● brand.
Section 6 – Content Planning
CONTENT
PLANNING
CONTENT CALENDAR
In order to manage your on-going communications effectively you’ll
need to plan ahead with a content calendar. This will not only make
sure you have your content ready in plenty of time to publish, it’ll also
let you plan around key industry events and other important dates. The
further ahead you plan your content, the more likely you’ll be to have a
consistent flow, which is key to building up a following.
There will be times when you’ll want to react quickly to a current trend
or piece of news, timely posts can get a lot of shares. So it’s good to
allow for flexibility. You might want to aim for 80% proactive and 20%
reactive content.
When it comes to publishing and promoting your content, the next steps
are measurement (detailed below) and adaption. Keeping a close eye on
what works well and what doesn’t will allow you to optimise the best
performing content on your network.
Section 6 – Content Planning
The frequency will vary by platform (and objectives) but ‘quality over
quantity’ is a good rule of thumb. The more relevant and interesting the
content, the more likely it will be shared and liked. If you find the
content genuinely interesting, it’s likely some other people will too.
And that’s more impactful than ‘wallpaper’ posts.
Having a clearly defined strategy that links to your USP will help you
widen the scope of content you can reference back to your brand,
which is important for building brand awareness in the early stages
when you may not have a great deal of content.
SECTION 7
MEASUREMENT -
KEY
PERFORMANCE
INDICATORS
In order to achieve the objectives for Facebook outlined above,
measurement and learning from what works and what doesn’t is key.
Facebook’s Insights platform offers in-depth stats on each Facebook post
and provides the most up-to-date and accurate figures on your audience
and your posts’ interactions.
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Social Media Strategy Guide
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Section 7 – Measurement and KPIs
Total Clicks
Cost per Conversion – Total Cost divided by Total Conversions
TWITTER MEASUREMENT
To determine the success of the content against the key goals and
objectives, it’s important to keep an eye on:
LINKED IN MEASUREMENT
The Analytics tab provides companies with metrics and trends about their
company page. Company page administrators can view very rich data about
their company page, these include:
UPDATES:
Impressions
The number of times each update was shown to LinkedIn members.
Clicks
The number of clicks on your content
Interactions
The number of times people have liked, commented on or shared each
update.
Followers Acquired
How many followers you gained by promoting each update.
FOLLOWERS:
Follower Demographics
A breakdown of who’s following your company
Follower trends
Showing how your number of followers has changed over time.
How You Compare
Your number of followers compared with other companies.
VISITORS
Unique Visitors to your brand page
Visitor Demographics – details on who’s visiting your page Onsite
Measurement
Once you have set up your accounts and developed a social media
management routine, schedule regular temperature checks for all your
channels to maintain a steady presence. Carrying out a monthly review of
activity is a good idea so you can review the performance of your recent
posts and activity. Pull out a simple table against your key metrics (such
as total followers, reach per platform, clicks to site etc) to track month on
month activity.
It is also valuable to deep dive into your social stats every few months.
The on-platform analytics tools provided by each platform are a good
place to start and there are also tools like SocialBro and Hootsuite’s
‘Grade Your Social’ which evaluate your Social presence with one
click; you can receive reports on your engagement, reach and profile
strength. If you find that your customers don’t engage as well on one of
your social channels, check to make sure you haven’t been neglecting
that channel. Likewise if you find that a certain type of post performs
well, factor more of these into your content calendar.
Over time you may find that the original objectives for your social
activity shift – for example where you once were trying to boost sales,
you are now aiming for brand loyalty. This is a natural evolution of
your marketing activities and means that it is time to alter your
approach. Revisit your original activity and head back to the start of
this guide to work up your new strategy.
Get expert advice on this and a wide range of topics for free
at your local Business Gateway office.
bgateway.com/local-office
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