How to Create a Social Media Content Strategy

Social media has a massive potential to blow your business in no time. However, the process isn’t as easy as it sounds. You cannot just simply post some irrelevant content on your social media account with no strict routine and expect results from it. Social media for business requires a social media content strategy. 

But how do we create a social media content strategy? We have outlined all the steps required to create a full-fledged social media content strategy that works great for different businesses. These steps will help maximize your social media marketing efforts with the help of strategic content creation for your business. Without any further ado, let’s start reading about creating the best social media content strategy for your business.

What is Content Creation in Social Media?

Content is a valuable asset that can transform your business metrics real quick. With millions of users actively scrolling through their social media feeds, there is a great chance for your content to shine on social media and promote your business. 

Social media for content creation can help you interact personally with prospects and attract more customers gradually. When you create a social media content strategy, you can readily post the best content on your business’s social media accounts and reach a vast audience base. The shares, likes, comments, and clicks are a great measurement of your social media engagement. Higher social media engagement can easily improve brand recognition and reputation, which can help you build loyal customers. Hence, content creation in social media is an inevitable aspect that makes a significant difference to every business. Also, utilizing white label social media management assistance into the strategy can streamline content scheduling and analytics, ensuring businesses make the most of their online presence.

Social Media Content Strategy: Steps to Take

Now that we have already discussed the importance of content creation on social media, let’s jump right into the complete process of creating a social media content strategy. The strategy is divided into three phases: Planning, publishing, and measuring and analyzing. Let’s check out each one of them in detail.

The Planning Phase

The planning phase lays the foundation of your social media content strategy. Here we will analyze the metrics that will give you a better insight into the audience and create content accordingly. 

1. Defining Your Audience

The first step to building a social media content strategy is to define your target audience. To create content that performs well with your audience, you need to define your target audience first and understand their behavior and other relevant analytics. Your content should be able to reach the right audiences and persuade them to take action in favor of your business. 

For starters, you need to build a simple buyer persona. To build a buyer persona, you can use different software and platforms such as Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, etc. Here, you can find plenty of your target audience demographics, which will help you understand your target audiences’ behavior. Some of the insights you should note about your target audiences are:

• Age
• Gender
• Interests
• Location
• Profession
• Education 

And many more…

When you consider these analytics and create a buyer persona accordingly, you have a well-laid plan about whom exactly you are creating the content for. This will help you target the right people through your content and make the most out of your social media content efforts.

2. Defining Your Topics

Once you define your target audience, the next step is to find the right topics. Here, you need to be slightly social savvy to find the best trending content on the internet and create your content around it.

Social media is constantly changing every day. What works for your social media today may not work the same way tomorrow. With trends updating every day, you need to stay updated too. 

Look out for the ongoing trends and issues that your target audience engages with. Accordingly, create a content strategy that covers all the topics that they need help with. Starting from queries to just information about a specific topic. You can find a broad range of content options when you go deeper with content analysis. 

To start with this process, you can examine your competitors and understand the type of content they post on their social media profiles. This can help you get a good idea about the content that works great for them in the same industry. Next, you can join a few communities on Quora, Reddit, etc., to know the topics most discussed within your industry. This way, you will have a plethora of topics defined by the end of the day, ready to be created and published on your social media.

3. Mapping Out Your Hashtags

Creating content is surely a tough task but promoting it well is even tougher. Irrespective of how excellent your content is, the efforts are in vain if it doesn’t reach the right audience. The ideal way to promote your social media content is to add relevant hashtags to your social media posts. You can either use third-party applications or tools that can provide you with a long list of the best performing hashtags in your industry or look out for the relevant hashtags yourself via the social media platform. 

The key is to implement at least three to six hashtags in every post that are highly searched and relevant to your business. This will help your content have higher discoverability and engagement gradually.

The Publishing Phase

Now that we have planned the content for your social media, let’s jump to the Publishing Phase, wherein we will discuss the right way to publish your social media content to make it the most effective. 

Building A Content Calendar

Once you know the list of topics you will cover as a part of your content strategy, you need to have a consistent approach to it. There is no way you can gain success in your social media content creation by posting content once in a blue moon.

The best way to be consistent with your social media content creation efforts is to create a content calendar. A calendar will help you visualize your upcoming weeks or months’ goals and organize them for strategic execution. You can try third-party content calendar tools and software that help in scheduling your content beforehand like Content Craft Social Calendar by Ampfluence which is now available on RocketHub!

While creating a content calendar, ensure to set a specific date and time to publish your content and adhere to it regularly. This way, you can segregate your content plans well and publish them regularly. When you get regular with your content, you can gradually find a good hike in the engagement rates of your social media accounts.

The Measuring and Analyzing Phase

The process of successful social media content marketing doesn’t really end with just creating content and having a stringent content schedule. It ends at measuring the performance of your content which allows you to optimize whenever required.

1. Take Notes on the KPIs

The first step to measuring your content performance is to analyze the KPIs. Your KPIs include impressions, reach, engagement rate, CTR, and many more. The KPIs help you to determine whether the content reaches the right audience and brings profit from it. 

You can find your KPIs via different social media platforms. For example, you can check out the Facebook Insights tab or Instagram Insights and get a detailed overview of the content that you have posted all this while and how it is performing with your target audiences. 

2. Audit Your Content

When you have the insights from the KPIs, you have a good analysis of the content that worked well for your business last month or week and which ones didn’t. This brings you to the next step, which is content auditing. Content auditing is simply the process of analyzing the content and optimizing it accordingly.

Here you need to understand what type of content didn’t work for your business and even better if you can find a way to repurpose it. Regular content auditing can help find the flaws in your content strategies and optimize them to bring the best results to your social media content marketing efforts. 

3. Build a Set of Action Items

After you audit your content, you will have a long list of the parts you would like to include or omit in your social media content strategy. Take baby steps and start optimizing your content accordingly. In addition to that, here are some extra steps you can take to make your social media content strategy more efficient.

Top 4 Strategies to Generate Traction in Social Media Marketing

The process of creating a thriving community isn’t easy, but it’s definitely worth it. Learn how to get traction through social media content marketing with these 4 top strategies.

Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is a strategy you should not miss to maximize your social media efforts. The influencer marketing industry is growing every day, and businesses are actively leveraging the best influencers in their industry to promote their products.

Customers nowadays mostly resort to the best and the most popular influencers in the industry and rely on them for purchasing decisions. You can leverage relationships with the leading influencers in the industry, which can help in growing your social media profile and bring more engagement to your business.

You can collaborate with an influencer via paid sponsorships and other elements wherein they are supposed to talk about your business with their audiences and direct them to your social media profile. 

You can also invest in an influencer management tool that can automate the process of finding the most profitable influencers for your business and pitch to them for collaboration. If things go well, there’s a good chance you can attract a good amount of followers to your business real quick.

Also, don’t forget to harness the relationships to a closer level. The more communicative you are with the influencer, the more they know about your business and the content they are about to promote. This also gives a good reputation and impression to them, which can positively impact the entire campaign. 

Utilize Rich Content to Increase Engagement

Content marketing is not just about creating a few social media posts. For a successful social media content strategy, you need to focus on publishing high-quality, relevant content which is shareworthy and gives your business good exposure simultaneously. 

Start by creating different types of content on your social media profile and leverage them accordingly. For example, video marketing is one of the best ways to grab your audiences’ attention since 90% of people prefer watching videos over reading texts. 

All you need is simply a good camera, microphone, and decent video editing skills. Even though you do not need exceptional video editing skills, you can always hire a video editor to make your videos professional. If budget constraints make hiring a video editor difficult, there are plenty of options for editing videos for free that can help you maintain a professional look without the extra expense. Some video ideas that you can try for your social media content are:

• Tutorials or How to guides
• Product reviews
• Funny memes
• Statistics
• Brand story or testimonials
• News covering the current topics

You can also host polls and quizzes as a part of your social media content strategy. This is a great way to understand how well your business and content strategy is doing since the responses will come directly from your audiences.

You can also create contests and giveaways on your social media profiles to promote your content and products. Simply create a specific task that helps in subtly promoting your content or business and set a reward for the winners. Ensure the rewards are profitable for the winners; otherwise, they wouldn’t spend time participating in the contest.

Lastly, you can also add in a dash of humor and create memes as a part of your content strategy since everybody loves a good laugh. Memes are a great choice of share-worthy content. Hence, it’s never bad to add some fun to your business and make it a bit friendly yet professional for your audiences.

User-Generated Content (UGC)

People love recognition. Leverage this to increase your engagement and content production process. Similar to a contest, where you simply ask your followers or audiences to upload a picture using your product or create something using your software. Next, use this content and feature them on your social media profiles. 

Suppose you somehow get your audiences to participate in the contests. In that case, you are also reaching a wider audience base through them since when they post the images or videos on their profiles, their audience also gets to know about your profile. 

Create Evergreen Content

Irrespective of the trends that are changing every day, there are a few types of content that always work well and are evergreen. Here you cannot go wrong since these types of content work well in almost every type of business and are well perceived by different target audiences. 

Even though we have mentioned a few evergreen content ideas above, similar options can be flash promos, host interviews, product demos, Q&As, etc.

In addition to that, you can go live on your social media profiles, interact with your audiences, and then save it later. Lives are an excellent way to build a loyal following base since the more your interact with your audience, the more they engage with your content. 

Leverage FOMO Factors with Ephemeral Content

FOMO is one of the inevitable factors most of us witness around us. The power of high-quality content over a short span can easily make your audience urge for more. Like we already mentioned, trends keep changing every day. If you do not stay updated with it, you are going to lose out on plenty of prospects. 

Similarly, when your social media content adheres to the changing trends, your audience will always be off the hook and eagerly expecting the next content to release. The curiosity about the next reveal can be a great way to make your content go viral frequently. Thus, leverage the Fear of Missing Out on your audiences, and you can pull a great follower count real quick.

Conclusion

Creating a social media content strategy can be a hefty task considering countless strategies and tricks revolving around the internet. Let’s not forget the perpetually changing trends on social media platforms as well. The key to a successful and profitable social media content strategy is creating a specific content plan as per the target audiences, being consistent with it, and regularly measuring it with the right KPIs. Now that you know the complete process of how to create a social media content strategy kickstart the process with your content creation today and witness the transformation in your business.