About 71%  of small-to-mid-sized businesses use social media for marketing, and 97% of Fortune 500 businesses use at least one social media platform to promote themselves.

The bottom line is that your competitors know the power of social media in attracting over 53% of the world’s population, and so, they maximize their ability to reel in these numbers over to their corner.

So, the competition is tough. To compete and win, you will have to do more than sporadic posting and put more thought into crafting an effective content strategy that attracts and converts your social media followers into loyal customers.

If you are reading this and wonder how to craft an effective social media content strategy, you are in the right place.

We know designing a functional social media content strategy isn’t the easiest thing to do. So, in this article, we’ve compiled a step-by-step guide to help you develop a working social media strategy that makes you stand out and drives the best results for your business.

Let’s begin.

7 Proven Steps To Develop Your Social Media Content Strategy

Content is king. You’ve probably heard that a million times, and it’s true. However, content is only king when done right. Without a thoughtful strategy behind your social media content, all your effort, time, and resources will go down the drain because you won’t see the results you need.

Thankfully, following these simple and practical steps can help you create a successful social media content strategy that grows your business. So let’s take a look.

1. Know Your Audience

Understanding who your audience is, is key to a successful content marketing strategy, especially on social media.

It’s easy to get tricked into believing everyone on social media needs your business. However, regardless of how valuable your product is, not everyone needs it. Therefore trying to get everyone to patronize you on social media is a complete waste of time.

If you observe the thriving businesses on social media, you will realize they are brands that genuinely know their target audience and channel their efforts into speaking and connecting to them.

To identify your target audience, craft a persona. Your persona is the imaginary character that has the traits of your ideal customer, such as needs, motivations, challenges, age, occupation, and location.

Understanding these factors will give you deep insight into your ideal customer, what they like, their challenges, and what motivates them. You can then craft content that piques their interests, solves their problems, and inspires them to buy.

When you craft your ideal persona, you will be able to channel your content marketing efforts into winning your customers one individual at a time, rather than trying to convert every social media user.  This way, you can get the most from your social media efforts and see the results you expect to see.

2. Focus On The Right Platform

There are tons of social media platforms to advertise and promote your products. These include Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and a wide range of others. But while it’s good to maximize each platform’s potential, it’s best to focus on the platforms that work best for your business.

How do you know the best platforms for your business? The right platforms are where the majority of your customers are. They are the platforms your audience spends most of their time, posting, engaging, or simply observing. And it varies from business to business.

So, it’s never a good idea to jump on a platform just because you know a business succeeding on that platform, unless, of course, the business offers the same product and service as yours with a similar target audience.

Identify the social media platform your audience spends most of their time on by analyzing your competitors’ audience or organizing polls and surveys. When you know where most of your audience is active, you can craft a social media strategy that attracts and converts your audience where they are.

For example, if you find out a large percentage of your audience spends most of their time on TikTok, then you can learn how to grow on TikTok by creating engaging content that drives interactions and connects with your audience right on TikTok.

Also, if most of your audience uses Facebook, craft valuable content, your audience on Facebook can relate to. No matter where your audience is, the key to attract and convert them is to create valuable and relatable content your audience will love.

3. Set Goals

After defining your target audience and identifying their most active social media platform, the next step is to set actionable goals. Start by identifying your marketing goals. Do you want to boost your visibility? Gain more followers? Generate leads and convert your leads to customers?

When you identify your marketing goals, you can then work on crafting your social media content marketing to help you achieve these goals.

For example, if your goal is to boost your brand awareness on social media, focus on creating content that can go viral.

Also, if your goal is to convert your leads to customers, focus on creating valuable content that builds trust so your lead can move from the consideration stage to the decision-making stage.

By setting goals, you will have a clear direction of where your content marketing is headed. You will know the purpose you want your content to serve, and you can monitor your activities to see if you are on the right track.

4. Plan Your Content

The fourth stage to creating a successful social media content strategy is content planning. What content do you want to create for your audience on social media? You can know the content you want to create by figuring out what you want to say to your audience.

An effective social media content marketing strategy educates, informs, and entertains your audience. So, create a working social media strategy by ensuring your content revolves around these functions.

Planning your content also involves planning your content formats. Variety works best on social media. So, combine different content formats to keep your audience engaged.

Post-user-generated content, organize contests, go live, create long and short videos. Ensure you maximize all the available features on your social media platforms to create different exciting content your audience enjoys.

For consistency and best results, use content planning tools like Sprout Social or CoSchedule.

5. Have A Content Calendar

After you’ve planned your content, the next thing to do is to create a content calendar. A content calendar contains all the content you want to create during a specific period, perhaps, a month, or few months, or a year.

The point of a content calendar is to facilitate your content creation process. It organizes your content by highlighting the days you will post and the content you will post on those days.

This goes a long way in helping you stay consistent in creating and posting content on social media. After all, you won’t have to worry about the content you have to post because you already have mapped out content topics on your content calendar to help.

Consistency helps create a positive impression on social media; it portrays you as a reputable brand your audience can count on. It also helps you stay relevant on social media to achieve your desired result.

6. Schedule Your Posts

As a business owner, marketer, or social media manager, you probably have your hands on many activities. This is why it helps to automate some of your tasks to make your job easier. Fortunately, posting your content across several social media platforms is one of the activities you can automate.

Rather than spend your days waiting for the right time to post on different social media platforms, use scheduling tools to schedule your posts.

All you need to do is choose the platform you want to post on, and set a date and time.

When you do this, your social media scheduling tool will post your content on the right platform and at the right time, even when you aren’t there.

This makes the process a lot easier, keeps you consistent, and helps you save time to focus on other areas of your social media content strategy.

7. Track Your Performance

The only way to know if your social media content strategy is working to bring the result you need is to monitor your performance. Consider the goals you set at the initial stage of your content marketing strategy and see if your effort is ticking the boxes.

How do you go about this? First, visit your dashboards on your social media platforms to monitor your analytics. You will see insights on which content drives the most engagements, generate more awareness, and boost your sales on your dashboards.

From there, you can know which content drives better results and which content isn’t. This will help you make the best decisions to boost your social media strategy game.

Conclusion

An effective social media strategy helps you achieve your marketing goals as a business. This article discusses seven practical steps you can take now to build a useful social media strategy for your business.

To create a successful social media strategy, identify your target audience, choose the right social media channel, set goals, plan your content, schedule your content, create a content calendar, and measure your results.

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