The importance of social media strategies

Setting up a social media page is quick, relatively straightforward, and free, which makes it easy to jump the gun and begin posting before thinking about your wider plans. However, creating an informed and detailed social media strategy can strengthen your brand presence and ensure every post serves a purposeful role in achieving your goals. 

What is a social media strategy?

Your social media strategy should serve as your go-to document for answering any question relating to your presence. At a glance, it gives your social media expert everything they’d need to know to start posting. 

Your social media strategy should ideally come before any account set-up or management, but if you’ve already got a company page then it’s not too late! Creating your strategy can serve as an important assessment of your current activity to check if you’re on track. This is especially important as consistency is key for a successful social media presence.

At a minimum, a social media strategy should cover:

• Social media objectives and KPIs 
• Customer personas
• Content strategy, including content pillars, tone of voice, and other key elements
• Key dates or campaigns

At Harris, our comprehensive strategies also cover a competitor analysis and a complementary social media audit including recommendations on where to improve your existing presence. 

The bigger picture

Similar to any PR/content or advertising strategy, your social media strategy should also work in harmony with your wider marketing and overall business strategies. Aligning your strategies ensures a consistent presence across all of your channels, which can then help you effectively deliver the key messages you want to communicate. 

It’s also important to regularly review your social media strategy. Not only to measure the success of your social media activity but also to review if those goals are still relevant. Simply due to the fast-paced nature of social media, some aspects of your content strategy might have shifted and need to be phased out or introduced more. For instance, removing hashtags, including more videos as part of your content mix, or even leaving an old platform or adopting a new one.

Top tips

1. When putting together a strategy, it’s important to be realistic about your goals. For instance, if your social media goal is to gain new leads or sales, creating engaging organic content will encourage your customers to think favourably of you, but paid advertising may be more effective at gaining new, cold leads. 
2. Decide on two or three KPIs that directly relate to your social media goals. We find that two or three strikes the right balance between accurately tracking performance without being overwhelmed. For our construction clients, we find that engagement rates and reach are amongst the most important KPIs that help them to build and maintain a strong presence year after year. 
3. Choose key dates and campaigns that are relevant to your business. A good social media strategy includes tailored campaigns and some awareness days. If you’re stuck for ideas, our free, downloadable awareness days calendar includes some of our team’s favourites for our industry. 
4. Keep your customer personas at the core of your strategy. While this might sound obvious, it can be easy to get carried away with messages you want to share, or think you should be sharing, rather than what your customer wants to hear. Think about their pain points, digital habits, and demographics, and build your strategy around this. 

Our approach

At Harris, our social media team knows exactly what goes into a great strategy to make sure your social media presence starts strong.

We pride ourselves on our collaborative approach, so we always start with a discovery call. This allows us to understand more about your business, what you want to get out of social media, and how you want to portray yourselves. Then we get to work creating the complete document. 

While we find that many of our clients follow this up with our integrated social media management service, the strategy document also serves as a great tool for you to get started on your social media presence in-house, or even to refresh or realign your platforms if you’ve already been posting for a while. 

If you need help with your social media strategy, contact us today.