The social media content strategy that your organization chooses to create has a profound impact on your company brand. Randomly posting content or blog post links to general company content no longer has the impact as it once did.
Plus, social media platforms have evolved and audiences have come to expect more from brands they choose to follow. And the demand for more interesting and engaging content also comes from your current employees and customers.
This means your company must continue to measure and adapt as needed, otherwise you’ll be left behind as competitors sweep the social media playing field.
So, how can you build an attractive social media content strategy? Below are some steps and tips to tune up your organization’s social media presence.
- Why A Social Media Content Strategy Matters
- Steps to Build A Social Media Content Strategy
- Types of Content Your Social Strategy Needs
Why A Social Media Content Strategy Matters
For most marketers, social media is a major component to building the brand. And more executive leaders are understanding the power social has too.
Think about the insane numbers the major platforms boast:
- Professional social network LinkedIn is approaching 700 million users (LinkedIn)
- Twitter is approaching 300 million active users (Statista)
- Facebook is approaching 2.5 billion users (Statista)
These social platforms allow you to build genuine connections to targeted audiences for your product or services, keep customers engaged, and allow employees to be enthused about the company they work for.
But, you may never reach full potential of these social networks without a social media content strategy in-place.
Here’s a collection of reasons why a social content strategy matters:
- A strategy helps save time by knowing what you’ll do before begin blindly posting
- It helps you understand why your social media marketing is working (or not working)
- Ensures you are attracting targeted audiences for marketing and sales
- Keeps your current customers engaged and excited about the brand they work with
- Grabs employees attention and will encourage them to share to their networks
- Establishes a brand people want to work for and makes recruiting top talent easier
That all sounds pretty sweet, doesn’t it?
So the real question for your team becomes, how do we build a social content strategy in a few effective steps?
Related: Looking to step up your social media policy and make it more modern? Here are some of the best examples out there. Download our in-depth guide.
Steps to Build A Social Media Content Strategy
Like any company initiative it’s important to build a strategy and playbook that is easy to follow. It keeps you organized, more focused on your goals, and allows you to eliminate what isn’t working.
Building a social media content strategy is no different and must be taken just as serious as any other process.
Here are some steps to follow to get your brand growing and more engaged with online.
1. Identify and establish key goals
For long-term social media success, you have to identify and establish the key goals with the content that is created and posted.
You need to understand the purpose of the brand, what values and mission your organization wants to accomplish, and ask who is our audience and what do they engage with?
Your social content strategy might also want to be broken down into categories for marketing, sales, employer brand, and recruiting. The reason being: social media can have multiple goals for your company.
This is the step where you really have to master what your brand is about. Otherwise you risk wasting time on content and posting items that add little to no value to the brand or audience.
2. Based on your goals, talk to key departments
Once you know your overall social media goals, you should connect with important department leaders.
For example:
- There will be specific priorities for sales and sales enablement when it comes to social content
- HR will have different objects specific for employer branding and recruiting
Get to know their specific goals and how you can support them with your social content strategy. This should also be a continued working relationship, where you get valuable information and content to use for social.
3. Audit your current social media content
Now that you have identified more about your goals, how do they align with what your social channels currently look like? This is where you want to do a full social content audit.
The social posts might be way off or attracting the wrong audience. Or maybe, your social content is doing some things right, but need to tweak XYZ a bit.
But in this step, you will understand what you need to start doing, what you need to do more of, and what you need to eliminate completely.
A simple way to audit your content is build a spreadsheet, split into different social platforms with key insights. But it’s up to you and your team on how you want to break down this info.
4. Research and analyze current results
Beside your current content audit, you must analyze the platforms and data as well. More questions you want answers for include:
- What platforms are we active on currently?
- What platforms should we be on that we are not?
- How are people engaging in each platform with our posts?
- Does one platform work better for blog posts and another better for work culture?
- Are we reaching the right people?
- Are employees and customers engaged too?
These questions answer many important content questions and what needs to be ramped up in specific social networks.
5. Get Executives and employees involved
Creating a social media content strategy that engages goes beyond your company social media handles. People enjoy the human social interaction and are more inclined to engage with content from actual people.
And you might have seen the data around this before, like this classic stat: Brand messages reached 561% further when shared by employees vs the same messages shared via official brand social channels (MSLGroup)
Part of your strategy should be getting company leaders and executives involved. Whether that is sharing content or helping create content that will be used on social media.
Additionally, encourage employees to get involved in sharing and creating various forms of content too.
Another classic stat related to this, “content shared by employees receives 8x more engagement than content shared by brand channels.” (Social Media Today)
Many successful and well-known organizations adopted this social strategy called employee advocacy.
Plus, with a platform like EveryoneSocial, this allows employees to be connected to colleagues, access to content and company info, engage with content and provide feedback, and have the ability to create and share content to their social networks easily.
Related: Learn more about Dell’s social strategy in a sustainable, employee-driven social media and content sharing program. Download the case study here.
6. Quarterly check ins
So you have your content strategy mastered down and posting schedule ready to go. You might also have an employee advocacy program running for even more social impact. But your work is not done!
Even if things appear to be running smoothly, you should do some quarterly check-ins and analyze results from your strategy changes.
More questions to analyze include:
- Has your strategy matched your goals and other departments’ goals?
- How’s social engagement been since you changed your posting and strategy?
- What is not working still? What can be improved?
Additionally, social platforms also evolve and change, so you have to know how to be adaptive with your strategy when needed.
The Types of Content Your Social Strategy Needs
If you are an active reader of the EveryoneSocial blog (you should be!) you’ve probably come across our article about the types of content for social media.
If not, that’s okay! I’m going to briefly recap in this section.
Below are some of the types of content your social strategy will need. Many of these are fairly standard among top brands, but you’d be surprised how many organizations still neglect these.
Educational content
How to’s, steps to achieve XYZ of social, strategy tips, research articles, etc, content that attracts and educates your targeted audience — not a product or service pitch, but genuine content that is valuable. We wrote more on educational content here.
Of course, this doesn’t mean you should not post products or services updates occasionally. Because consumers still have a need to see that.
But if your company’s social profiles is all just “sales” content, you’ll lose your audience quickly.
User-generated and employee-generated content
Content that your customers or employees create. This can be blog posts, customer reviews, videos, photos, etc.
People trust and value content that comes from humans over traditional marketing ads or even executives. Ads and execs are here to stay, but human advocates are increasingly impactful, authentic, and strategic brand ambassadors.
Plus, your customers and employees are more willing to share and be engaged with content they created. Thus, expanding the reach of your brand.
Videos, gifs, and images
Linking to your content to drive back to your website is good to do, but social platforms want to keep users internally in the platform. Meaning, they don’t want people clicking off and away to your content.
So that means, the social algorithms are favoring content that keeps people engaged and in the specific platform. Video continues to be popular (especially native video uploads directly to the social platforms), gifs, and still images or carousel images.
Find ways to be creative and educational, but mix in mediums that are not just links to your company content or third-party content.
Customer stories
Do you want to drive home the value of your product or services? Is one of the main goals of your social media content strategy to drive more leads and sales?
Then customer stories are a must to showcase on your company’s social media handles.
Anything that highlights your customers, results they achieved with your company, or customer quotes and reviews can drive some great engagement.
Plus, your audience may start to convert or become a customer based on this type of content.
Work culture and careers
A huge part of your social content strategy should be showcasing your work culture and open job opportunities. Attracting top talent and retaining employees are powerful for your company and social media is key.
An interactive and highly engaged content practice is to share employee stories.
This is content that displays from employees why they love their work. It could also be highlights of employees jobs and what they do outside of work, etc.
But this can impact marketing and sales too. People want to do business with companies who treat their employees right and one that employees love advocating for regularly.
Final Thoughts
While most large companies or socially established brands are creating the above content types, they also have their own creative spin to things.
It’s exactly why you must revert back to the steps mentioned here in setting up a social media content strategy in the first place. And while most of the above content types are not exactly unique, they are still essential to your social strategy.
But when you’ve identified your organization’s social tone, branding, and find your own creative lane, the above content types actually become more original to your brand.
People will identify with your brand, want to engage more, and find value in what is being shared.
So, is your company creating an attractive social media content strategy yet? What about now? Now? Now? 😉
