Social media is a powerful tool.  As you are looking to market your company, remember that what you post on social media has the power to turn your brand into a common household name.  It’s not enough to periodically show up on a platform and post things that your audience doesn’t care about.  The way to make your presence known and to grow your business using social media as a tool is to identify specific goals, make sure you are reaching your target audience, create exciting and engaging content, and distribute your information on the right platforms.  There isn’t one correct way to do this.  Your strategy may differ from others out there depending on your business and your audience, but it is universally important to develop an effective social media content marketing strategy that will work for you. 

The first, and possibly most important thing to remember when building your social media content marketing strategy is to intentionally set specific and achievable goals.  There are important decisions you need to make before posting on social media, like branding, audience, engagement, and traffic.  As with any marketing campaign, everything should be purposeful and in line with your business objectives.  Included in your goals should be to build your brand awareness, ways to grow your audience, boost community engagement, drive traffic to your website and sales.  This all goes along with choosing social media marketing goals that align with your business objectives.  

Part of this is reaching your target audience, and in order to do this, you need to do your research.  Learn everything you can about your audience.  You may think you know your target audience, but real and accurate data is needed to do this effectively.  There are tools available like Google Analytics, Facebook Page Insights, and Instagram Insights to help gather the needed data.  These tools can help you narrow your focus.  After your research, you will know content formats with the highest engagement rates, where people will see your content, and what times of day your audience is most active.  After you gather data and have a clear understanding of who you are targeting, you can choose your target platforms.  The world’s most popular social media platforms that should be considered when planning your strategy include Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok and Twitter.  Consider which platform supports the type of content that best portrays your business or product.  

The only way to figure out if your strategy is working is to set up metrics tracking.  You will want to measure your reach, the clicks you are getting, and track your social engagements.  There are many tools out there that can help you to track all the information you need to determine your effectiveness.  It is also a good idea to get to know your competition.  Don’t be afraid to look at what others are doing in your area.  Look at what is getting reactions and engagement.  Sometimes looking at what others are doing will help get your creative juices flowing.  

Once you figure out which platforms, and how to track your marketing, it’s time to create engaging content.  You probably have ideas of what you want to create, but you can also collaborate with others, or hire an influencer to help get the word out. You may want to test your content to make sure that your strategy is effective.  Use relatable content, but also use humor, trends, and inspiration in your posts.  Just make sure you remain true to your brand.  

After you have figured out what content is performing best for your business, and you have your specific goals identified, it’s time to build a social media content calendar.  This approach will help you see the big picture when it comes to social media content planning.  It’s important to be able to visualize your ideas and organize them in an effective way.  This will make your strategy easier to executive.  Your research will come in handy here as you decide the best times to post on each platform, what content has performed well, and what postings have been most effective at driving sales.  Also, a calendar will make it easier to collaborate on social media posts, either with people inside your company or influencers, if you have decided to use them in your postings.  

There are additional things you can add to this strategy like ways to engage your audience and involve them in your posts, posting incentives to help grow your audience, blog posts that are interesting and helpful to your audience and encouraging the sharing of your content and utilizing hashtags.  Hashtags help to reach people who not only follow your business, but are following a specific trend, interest, or product.  You can also join groups on Facebook or LinkedIn that relate specifically to your industry or business and share content when the opportunity arises. 

Effectively planning a social media content strategy is an ongoing process, and one that will continue to evolve and change.  Social media marketing can feel overwhelming, as the rules, opportunities, audiences, and value propositions greatly vary from one platform to the next, but with a focused plan it can be achieved.  Putting a plan in place that includes your brand, your target audience goals, featured topics along with a posting calendar, great metrics and a means for feedback, tone and rules of engagement, use of the right platforms, looking at key performance indicators, and a call to action should get you where you want to be.  Use all these tools in an organized and systematic way, taking advantage of the tools of the trade.  And remember that in this ever-changing world, it’s okay to be wrong and head back to the drawing board.  If you are willing to learn from the past, use data to improve, and shift as needed, you can create a social media content strategy that will keep you looking to the future with optimism and excitement.  Social media is an amazing marketing tool that, when used correctly, can be extremely effective.