Social Media Content Strategy: How to Build a Successful Plan in 8 Steps

Key takeaways

• Social media is a key digital marketing channel that requires a unique content strategy.

• Many companies use social media to engage and expand audiences. It's important to understand social media best practices as you develop your strategy.

• Developing a social media strategy typically involves outlining your goals, determining the most effective content types to create, and measuring performance.  

Discover the steps you should follow to build a successful social media content strategy. Afterward, learn how to create a strong social media brand presence and measure campaign performance with the Meta Social Media Marketing Professional Certificate.

Social media content strategy: 8 steps

An effective social media content strategy is a detailed plan that outlines what you hope to achieve, how you'll achieve it, and how you'll measure results, allowing you to either refine or continue your strategy.  

Learn more about the steps needed to design and implement your social media content strategy.

1. Define goals and objectives.

Creating a social media strategy means first identifying what you want to achieve. Your goals should be tied to the outcomes social media platforms were designed for.

Some examples of social media goals include:

• Increase brand awareness and reach: Grow follower count across platforms, boost post engagement (likes, comments, shares), expand content visibility through hashtags and user-generated content (UGC).

• Drive website traffic and lead generation: Increase clickthrough rates on social media posts, promote landing pages and lead magnets, convert social media followers into email subscribers or customers.

• Improve customer service and engagement: Reduce response time to customer inquiries on social platforms, increase positive sentiment in customer interactions, use social listening to gather feedback and address concerns proactively.

2. Understand your target audience.

It's important to continuously analyze who's engaging with your existing social media presence. Regularly review your social media analytics to gather up-to-date customer and audience data, including demographics such as age, gender, profession, location, and interests. Complement this with periodic customer surveys to gain deeper insights into your audience's preferences and behaviors.

Use advanced analytics tools to explore historical data trends, engagement patterns, and audience growth across your social media channels. This ongoing analysis will be helpful as you adapt your content strategy to ensure it remains relevant and engaging to your evolving audience. By staying attuned to your audience's characteristics and interactions, you can make data-driven decisions to optimize your content, posting schedule, and engagement tactics across all your social media platforms.

3. Reflect on your brand voice.

Social media can be a space to explore variations of brand voice in ways that other channels can't. To determine your brand voice for social media, start by identifying your company's core values, mission, and target audience.

Analyze your existing communications and consider how you want your brand to be perceived. Define key personality traits that reflect your brand's identity, such as friendly, professional, or innovative. Create a brand voice chart that outlines how these traits are expressed in specific language and tone across various types of content.

Study your audience's communication style and preferences to ensure your voice resonates with them. Finally, test your brand voice across various social media posts and adjust based on audience engagement and feedback. Consistency is key, so ensure all team members understand and can implement the established brand voice guidelines.

4. Choose the right platforms and content types.

There are many different social media platforms—and you don't always need to build a presence on each one. Understanding your audience can help you determine the most effective platforms for your goals, ensuring you're reaching the right customers. For example, if your target audience is 17-19 and prefers short-form video content, you might find them on TikTok. However, if your target audience consists of business owners, LinkedIn might serve you best.

Social content types

You'll want to tailor the content you produce for each platform. Content types might include:

• Written copy

• Images

• Infographics

• Short videos or reels

• Video stories

• User-generated content (UGC), such as customers’ photos and videos, or product reviews 

• Reposts

• Influencer content and partnerships

• Live streams

5. Develop a social content calendar.

A good social media content strategy includes a social calendar, which is a schedule of when each social media post will go out. You can create your content calendar in an Excel spreadsheet, a specialized template, or through different social listening tools. These tools allow you to enter your posts into a calendar, and the software will automatically post each piece of content to the target social media channel on the scheduled date and time. 

You will align your content with key dates, such as holidays, campaigns, product launches, and business goals. Then, you can decide how often to post according to your marketing goals and add the timeline to your content calendar, recording each post’s posting date and time, the required images or videos, captions, and hashtags. 

6. Engage with your audience.

A large part of a social media content strategy includes engagement. Engaging with your audience helps you define whether your content is effective. By producing content that consumers like and interactive content like polls and competitions, you can increase engagement and build relationships with your customers and followers. This engagement increases your reach, which refers to the number of people who see your content. 

A strong social media presence also includes excellent customer service and social listening. Customers message, comment, and talk about your brand; you must tune into that discussion and respond effectively. Customers value authenticity, and seeing a brand communicate and engage with its customers on a platform by answering questions and posting UGC, such as customer reviews and photos, and videos of customers using products, builds trust. 

7. Monitor trends for social media content.

Social media is constantly evolving, and new trends emerge regularly. It’s essential to stay up-to-date with trends to determine what your audience wants to engage with, so you can decide whether participating in that trend is right for your brand. Not all trends will be suitable for your brand and audience.

8. Track analytics and measure performance.

Your social media content strategy should be flexible and informed by what works well and what does not. You need to track and analyze key metrics to understand whether your content is effective in helping you reach your goals, like increasing return on investment (ROI) and building brand awareness. Some of the metrics you might track include engagement, such as the number of likes and comments on a post, click-throughs to a sales page or website, and lead conversions. 

You can use each platform’s built-in social media analytics or tools like Google Analytics to determine which posts perform the best. You can also utilize a social media management platform, such as Buffer or Hootsuite, to track your metrics across various social media platforms in one convenient location. You can view charts, graphs, and reports to assess your metrics and use this data to make informed decisions, including whether to repurpose content, change the content medium, or adjust the posting time. 

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