Building an Effective Social Media Strategy for Your Brand
Learn how to create engaging content and build a loyal following across multiple social media platforms with proven strategies.
Most social media strategies are a posting schedule with a mission statement stapled to the front. A strategy is the set of decisions that make the schedule obvious, and there are only about four of them.
Decide what the account is for
An account that exists to be found, an account that exists to keep existing customers warm, and an account that exists to hire people are three different accounts. Trying to be all three produces a feed that reads as none of them.
Write the purpose down in one sentence and check every post against it. Half the arguments about tone disappear once the sentence exists, because most of them were really arguments about audience.
The four decisions
- One platform, properly. Five accounts posting the same thing is one account with four echoes, and it costs five times as much attention to run.
- A format you can repeat weekly. The format that survives is the one somebody can make on a bad week, not the one that looked best in the pitch.
- A reason for somebody to reply. Reach follows conversation on every platform that has ever existed. A post nobody can answer is a post nobody sees.
- A number you check monthly, not hourly. Daily numbers on social are noise. Monthly ones are a trend, and only trends should change a plan.
What to post when you have nothing to post
The reliable answer is the work itself: what you tried, what it cost, what happened. It needs no production, it cannot be copied by a competitor, and it is the only category of post that gets more interesting as you get better at your job.
The unreliable answer is commentary on somebody else’s news. It fills a slot and it teaches the audience nothing about why they should follow you rather than the source.
When to give up on a channel
Give it six months of honest effort, then look at whether anything downstream moved: sign-ups, replies, applications, sales. If the only thing that grew is the follower count, the channel is a hobby.
Closing an account is a legitimate outcome, and it is cheaper than the slow version where nobody posts and nobody says so.
