The 4 Pillars of a Social Media Strategy

Our common goal is to take your social media presence to the next level with strategic principles. For this, we give you the basics of the social media strategy as a set of tactics to achieve the set goal: The effective management of social media content that appeals to users and contributes to the achievement of your company goals.

Why? Because the demands of users for informative, well-researched, and professionally prepared content are higher than ever. It is no longer enough to simply copy content from one medium to another. What is needed is relevant and channel-specific content that caters to the needs of the target group and provides them with answers to their questions and solutions to their problems. In order to achieve this, a strategic alignment of the content production is required.

The key questions of a social media strategy

A comprehensive social media strategy is very multifaceted and different in its form from company to company. It ranges from discussions and addressing the target group to design guidelines and community management. In this article, however, we will focus on the foundation on which your strategy is built and in this context, we ask ourselves the following questions:

• • • • • What do I want to achieve with social media?
        • Who do I want to address with my content?
        • On which platforms and via which content do I want to communicate?
        • How does the content production process work?

Are you ready to question your social media presence and put it through its paces? Then go on a journey with us and read on, because we want to convince you of the importance of the strategic approach in matters of social media.

1st pillar: Set yourself realistic goals

What about your course direction? Are you already sailing full speed ahead in your team with your social media channels and do you know your destination? Or do you let the wind whip you and nobody really know where the journey is going? For a team to pull together, it needs a common goal.

The following applies: All goals should contribute to the overarching corporate goals and correspond to the needs of the customers. However, always keep an eye on your resources when planning. Unrealistic goals demotivate you and your team in the long run. The following are, for example, possible goals for your social media presence:

• • • • Brand awareness
      • image
      • Range
      • service
      • Customer loyalty
      • New customer acquisition and conversion
      • Sale
      • Knowledge transfer and much more

It is best to work out the goals together as a team. In the first step, these can also be formulated generically. Once the goals have been set, it is necessary to specify them. A tried and tested system is the SMART formula. It ensures that your goals are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time.

Failure to define or imprecisely formulate goals is a common reason for an efficient social media presence to fail. So that you and the team remain motivated and do not lose sight of the path to the overall goal, it makes sense to break down the defined goals into sub-goals. Also, don’t forget to celebrate small successes and always keep in mind on your way that every piece of content should contribute to one of the goals. In order to be able to evaluate success or failure, it is necessary to make your goals measurable using key figures.

Your content can contribute to the achievement of goals in very different ways. Social media content can:

• inform your customers
• convince your customers
• create a dialogue with your target group
• support in the decision-making process
• Integrate customers into company processes
• teach customers something
• entertain the customers or
• improve the image.

If you and your team know where you want to go, a big step has been taken. Next, let’s turn our attention to the next pillar of a social media strategy: the audience.

Also Read: Social Media Marketing: The Complete Guide

2nd pillar: Know your target group

No matter how much time and money you can invest in creating content, if it doesn’t meet the interests and needs of the target audience, the effort is in vain. In order to entertain, inform, influence, or instruct users, it is necessary to know their needs, wishes, and concerns. Because that’s how you get in touch with them.

A common mistake when developing content is paying too much attention to whether the text, photo, or video pleases the creator, the team, or the manager. It is forgotten for whom the content was created and who is to be addressed with it. Often the content creator simply does not put himself in his target group.

In order to make the target group tangible for you and your team, it helps to create prototypical profiles of them. These profiles are known as personas and represent user profiles that contain detailed information about the target group. This includes demographic data such as age, place of residence, education, income, shopping behavior, interests, but also information about a person’s needs, problems, and motivation. The more you point out and then describe your target group, the more human it becomes. It also helps that it is given a name. All of this is to see them as real characters who are always present during content creation.

For example, one of our crowd media personas is called Stefan Printz, is 47 years old and heads the PR department of a medium-sized company. Below you can see an excerpt from Stefan’s persona profile.

You can obtain information for developing such a persona from market research, studies, customer surveys, colleagues from customer service, Facebook or Twitter statistics, or from questions or complaints received via the social media platforms themselves. One possibility is also targeted take part in discussions, for example in forums or Facebook groups, and thereby receive information.

With defined goals and knowledge of your target group in our luggage, we are a big step closer to a good basis for your social media strategy. Next, we’ll talk about the appropriate channel selection.

3rd pillar: Choose your channels based on your topics

At this point, the following applies: On the one hand, the channels should be checked for their suitability for achieving the defined goals when they are selected. On the other hand, they should be selected based on where the target group is. It makes no sense to be present on platforms if the target group is not there.

Remember that content should contribute to the overall goals and not just meet the requirements of the respective channel. As an agency, we first consider topics that then result in the appropriate format such as text, image, or video. Only in the last step is it decided which channel will be used for distribution, because we produce content for our customers, not for Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.

At the same time, you need an overview of the platforms on which your company is already active and what content you publish there. Once all the content has been collected centrally in a table, you can quickly see how the distribution is going to take place. Such a content inventory could look like this, for example:

Think about which formats you can use to stage your content on the individual platforms. If your brand communicates mainly through visual imagery, the Instagram and Pinterest channels come into question. So your job is to find out which platform is more suitable for achieving your goals and where your target group is located. There are also channels that require more maintenance and therefore more resources than others, which is why you should keep this in mind when choosing a channel.

4th pillar: work as a team and know the processes

A social media strategy involves numerous workflows. Numerous people, some from different departments, are involved, from developing the strategy itself to creating content and evaluating it. It is absolutely essential to clearly define roles and assign their work tasks and responsibilities. You also need someone who wears their hat and has extensive decision-making powers.

You may be responsible for creating the various text, image, and video content formats on your own or with many different people such as editors, video staff, and photographers. It should be noted that the content created pursues the content goals and complies with the design guidelines. Such guidelines are particularly important when external employees or freelancers are involved in the content production process. The guidelines ensure that the content is of consistent quality regardless of the production model and that the customer experience is consistent across all channels.

When developing your social media strategy, keep the following points in mind:

• • • • Who is responsible for what?
      • Which competencies are available internally?
      • Where may freelancers or agencies need to be called in?
      • What guidelines for content production do you need?
      • Which tools can help?
      • How do controlling and optimization take place?

Editorial calendar as a content control center

Do you have an overview of the content mix on your social media channels? Do you know the main topics and the status of individual contributions? Then you seem to have everything under control and maintain an editorial plan. Because this helps you with the daily organization and planning of content. Regardless of whether it is controlled by a software tool or a self-created document such as an Excel table. An editorial plan ensures that articles are handled in a structured and planned manner. If you look after it carefully, it will point out any gaps in the planning and show you how the main topics are distributed. For example, it contains information such as

• Release date
• Social media channel
• The topic of the post
• Content format
• Responsible for content
• Approval officer
• Deadlines
• Processing status

The list can be expanded with further aspects, depending on the field of application. However, too much information leads to confusion. For this reason, we recommend prioritizing the aspects and avoiding information with a low priority. You can download a template as an example for an editorial calendar here.

The content lifecycle

What is your perspective on content production? Do you see it as a one-way street, the end of which is reached with a publication, or as we do as a cycle with no beginning and no end? The publication of content is far from over – not even with social media content. From the generation of ideas to the measurement of success, content goes through several processes that are all intertwined.

After some ideas have been generated, it is important to prioritize them and assess them according to the effort. Hand in hand, you plan the individual contributions in the course of your editorial planning. The planned formats go into production and are prepared for specific target groups and channels. Not to be forgotten at this point is that your content should have a recognition value. A uniform imagery and color scheme, matched to the corporate colors, help. When publishing your content, tools like Hootsuite with the ability to schedule posts can also make your life easier.

Social media also has a lot to do with testing. To find out what days and times your community is most active and provide them with content at the right time. In order to spread the content, it is also worth investing a little budget in order to increase the reach of the content. Try yourself here and start, for example, with a budget of 5 to 10 euros per contribution. Cooperations with, for example, other Facebook pages are also helpful to spread your content on the social web.

Last but not least, it is absolutely essential that you measure success! This is the only way to find out which content works well and what can be dispensed with in the future. It will help you and your team to gradually adapt the content to the needs of your target group. When setting metrics to measure your success, it’s important that they are always related to a goal. However, it is not enough to define measured values. The results must also be prepared in an understandable and clear manner in reports and regularly discussed in meetings.

You now know the most important basic pillars of a social media strategy and can assess whether your social media presence is on a solid foundation.