How to Create a Social Media Strategy in 2024

The question for marketers isn’t if they should invest in social media marketing, but how they can create a successful social media strategy that aligns with business and marketing objectives. Well-planned, trackable, and flexible social media strategies are a must in a dynamic marketplace with stiff competition and public sentiment that can quickly shift. This comprehensive guide highlights the steps to create the best social media strategy using a plan, execute, evaluate, and evolve approach. It includes the following components.

• Aligning social media goals and key performance indicators (KPIs)
• Organizing the team and process
• Target audience research and personas
• Competitive analysis
• Selecting the right platforms
• Profile branding and optimization
• Creating a social media calendar
• Developing content and messaging that resonates
• Leveraging paid versus organic social
• Testing the strategy and campaigns
• Evolving the strategy

1. Align goals and KPIs

Start your social media marketing plan by defining achievable goals using the SMART— specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, timely—framework and developing KPIs that measure success in achieving those goals. This helps you set expectations, monitor, and, if necessary, adjust active campaigns, calculate return on investment (ROI), and prove to your company that marketing is making a positive impact.

Below are some of the most common social media marketing goals and KPIs to consider.

Social media goals

Establishing clear goals helps focus your energy and team in the right direction and avoid social media marketing mistakes.

• Increase brand awareness: A brand that’s recognizable and trusted can drive sales and revenue. Studies indicate 59% of buyers prefer to purchase new products from familiar brands. Boost your brand awareness by encouraging followers to share your posts, retweet, or share an image to help spread the word about your brand. Or try creating a contest and let followers share it with others.
• Increase brand sentiment: Brand sentiment reflects how the public feels about your brand. Try posting user-generated content (UGC) to encourage followers to express their own positive sentiments about your brand. Don’t forget to use social media martech to track social mentions about your brand, product, service, or company, and gauge your social communities’ health.
• Drive relevant traffic: Relevant traffic is comprised of people who are interested in your product or service and likely leads and prospects. Engage your target audience and direct them to your website by promoting a blog, or by creating an infographic or video that links to your website. Offer free access to an ebook or create a brief survey that ends with a call to action and website link.
• Drive consideration: Consideration is a critical point in the marketing funnel where leads become qualified prospects and begin evaluating options and social media provides valuable funnel touchpoints. Share remarkable customer reviews via social media that highlight the quality and benefits of your product or service, and your commitment to customer care. Create a simple infographic that compares what you offer to the competition.
• Drive revenue: Every chance you get to influence buyers along the marketing funnel should lead them closer to conversion. A direct way to drive revenue via social media is to develop a promotion with a special offer. It can be extra loyalty points, a discount, a bonus, or another special deal that incentivizes people to buy.
• Lead generation: Leads are potential customers who have shown interest in your company’s products or services. One way to help fill the marketing funnel and generate leads is to create click-through to your website from social media posts. For instance, create a new graphic for a social media post announcing a product upgrade that’s linked to a landing page on your website about the upgrade via a unique UTM.
• Build community: Customers and influencers want to feel connected with the brands they admire. So what better way to foster connections than to engage with them directly via social media? Foster a vibrant social community by creating things people can interact with, such as surveys, contests, polls, and videos, and then asking them questions.
• Customer service: Consumers use special media to get a response from a brand if a problem occurs. It’s also a forum where customers ask questions and solicit opinions, making social media an essential element in your overall marketing plan and customer support plan. Suppose you sell software and a customer asks if a certain feature is available in a post. If there’s a newer version of the software available that includes the feature or something similar, point it out and offer an incentive to upgrade.

Social media KPIs

KPIs are critical to measuring the success of your social media strategy and your ability to change campaign elements that aren’t working and planned.

• Clicks: The click-through rate (CTR) to your website, whether from organic or paid social media, is tied to lead generation metrics. For more insight, once a potential customer clicks through to your website, use click tracking software and generate reports on where visitors click on select website pages.
• Impressions: This is the number of times your post was visible in someone’s feed or timeline. Although impressions don’t reveal content engagement or click-throughs, they matter because fewer impressions can impact your engagement and reach.
• Engagement: This KPI indicates the extent that your content captured your audience’s attention and inspired them to stop and engage via actions such as likes, shares, and comments.  
• Reach: Reach is used to define who sees your content. Usually, impressions will be higher than reach, which counts interactions. Reach also includes the level of “voice share”—the number of times your brand is mentioned on social media versus the number of times competitors’ brands are mentioned.
• Revenue: Calculate ROI and show the effectiveness of your campaign by identifying how many sales are generated by customers originating from social media platforms. Compare your social media lead-to-customer conversion rate to evaluate the quality of the leads coming from social media and the performance of your marketing funnel.

2. Organizing the team and process (DACI)

Successful social media marketing involves several skillsets, including strategy development, content creation, community engagement, and data analysis. Generally, social media marketing teams include the following roles, although they can vary from business to business.

• Social media director: The director promotes company brands and products or services via various social media platforms while keeping a pulse on marketplace trends and the competition. The director reviews and approves the social media marketing strategy and works closely with the marketing director and social media manager. The director also works cross-functionally with other departments and peers to align activities and achieve corporate business objectives.
• Social media manager: Social media managers know the brand inside and out, define target audiences and create social media marketing plans. The role includes developing and promoting engaging content—usually working with a content creator—and measuring campaign success.
• Strategist: These experts are responsible for planning, developing, and implementing the social media strategy to support and enhance digital marketing efforts and the company’s social presence. The strategist collaborates with the social media director and manager and seeks consensus within the management team on the strategy and its evolution.
• Content creator: This position supports the social media manager, influences content strategy, and sparks creative direction. Required skills may include copywriting, graphic design, photography, and video. In larger companies, content creators might work with a social agency or a brand’s creative team to develop creative assets.
  

Social media process with DACI

A well-defined, collaborative social media marketing team helps ensure campaign quality and success. Assign specific roles to team members using a DACI (decision, approver, contributor, informed) framework to optimize team effectiveness, speed, clarification, and unity.

• Driver: The driver is the project leader. The role includes contributor selection, scheduling and running project meetings, assigning tasks, tracking the team’s progress, gathering and distributing ideas, providing project status and reports, and acting as an interface between the approver and contributors.
• Approver: This person approves all aspects of a project and coordinates cross-functionally with other departments as needed. For example, a marketing director may be the approval point for the social media marketing campaign budget and greenlight a social media project.
• Contributors: The driver typically selects contributors who create content, analyze data, manage the social media communities, and perform testing.
• Informed: Sometimes, people across the company who are not directly involved with social media campaigns need to be updated. For instance, customer complaints mentioned in social media posts should be shared with the customer support manager.
  

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3. Target audience research and personas

Accurately identifying your target market allows you to choose the right social media platforms and create content that relates to your audience with the appropriate messaging, voice, and tone.

Define your target audience by determining the demographics of the people who need or want your product or service. Consider age, location, education, income, occupation, marital/relationship status, education level, and other vital attributes.

Next, define the buyer personas within your target audience. These are representations of your actual customers within the served market segment. Use psychographics to identify different core characteristics and interests, behaviors, personalities, attitudes, values, lifestyles, behavior, and purchasing motivations. Then develop messaging and content tailored to key personas.

Suppose your brand sells upscale travel accessories. Buyer personas within your target audience include people who travel solo, with a partner or within a group, and with family and children. Based on market research, you may wish to create a campaign targeted at solo travelers. Not only will this campaign generate leads, it tells people within this persona that you understand their unique needs and care about them. It will strengthen your connection with them and establish your brand as one they identify with.

Tip: Review your existing customers to help identify buyer personas, including their behavior patterns, motivations, goals, and demographics.

4. Competitive analysis

Keep a sharp eye on your competitors. How are they marketing their products or services, and how do they compare with yours? Identify the social media platforms the competition utilizes, monitor what they post, their marketing messages, how they engage with users, the hashtags they use, and their share of voice.

Start by grouping competitors based on similarities, then use a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis to get a clear picture of how you stack up to the competition. Identify what makes the competition weaker and what makes them stronger, and the opportunities you have to grow.

Leverage social media tools to perform competitive analysis, such as:

• BuzzSumo: Tracks the key metrics around your competitor’s activity. Identify what content works best, which social media networks perform best, who shares their content, and so on.
• Hootsuite Streams: Tracks the competition’s social activities, including post engagement, hashtags, conversations, keywords, and mentions.
• Brandwatch: Create a social media competitor report that includes their share of voice and how much people talk about your competitors
• AgoraPulse: Use social listening and other tools to discover insights and trends about your brand and your competitors’ brands.
• Synapview: Go beyond a competitive analysis project and continually monitor competitors and hashtags, Instagram, Reddit, YouTube, Twitter, Pinterest, and blogs.

5. Selecting the right platforms

Seven in 10 Americans use social media for entertainment, engage with friends, learn about current events, and share ideas, information, and opinions. Social media platforms cater to different demographics and audiences. Analyze each to determine its audience demographics and which platforms are most relevant for your content strategy. And as mentioned earlier, analyze your competitors and identify the platforms they’re most active on.

• Facebook: Around 69% of U.S. adults use Facebook. Users between the ages of 25 and 34 years are the most significant demographic group. Statista indicates an even 1:1 male to female ratio in this age group, although female users outnumber males in other age groups.
• Instagram: 25 to 34-year-olds represent the largest advertising audience on this photo and video-sharing social networking platform, followed closely by the 18 to 24-year old age group. Per a recent Statista report, 56.5% of users were female, and 43.5% were male.
• Twitter: Around 63% of Twitter users are between 35 and 65 years old, and 67% of all B2B businesses use Twitter as a marketing tool.
• Reddit: 36% of U.S. adults who use Reddit are aged 18 to 29, 14% are age 30 to 49 years, and male users outnumber females two to one.
• Quora: This popular question and answer website has a 43/57 female-to-male ratio. According to Quora’s B2B Marketing Guide, 54% of Quora users have an annual household income greater than $100,000.
• LinkedIn: 24% of Millennials use LinkedIn, 50% of internet users with a college degree or higher, and 92% of B2B marketers include LinkedIn in their digital marketing mix.
• Snapchat: Snapchat advertises that it reaches 75% of Gen Z and Millennials and that users spend more than 30 minutes a day on Snapchat. Statista reports that, as of January 2021, 57.4% of users were female, and 40.9% were male.
• TikTok: The vast majority of 100 million monthly active users in the U.S. are below 30 years old. The majority of them use TikTok to find funny/entertaining content, followed by posting and sharing content.
• Clubhouse: This social audio app attracts early adopters, influencers, technologists, startup founders, and media and creatives in the music industry. The audience is reported as 52% male, with 39% ages 25 to 34.
• Pinterest:  According to Pinterest, 478 million people use the platform each month to find ideas and inspire their next purchase. Around 60% of their global audience comprises women, and 45% of the people in the U.S. with a household income of more than $100,000 are on Pinterest.

6. Profile branding and optimization

Your brand should be easily recognizable across all marketing channels and touchpoints, including social media. Plus, brand consistency instills feelings of reliability and trust.

Use your brand’s approved logo and color palette and use a uniform business description across social media platforms. Follow your brand guidelines as you would for any marketing effort, appropriately reflecting your brand identity, promise, voice, and tone. Also, the marketing assets you use on social media should be on brand and on message, including everything from copy to visual assets.

Tip: Identify SEO keywords and phrases that describe your company and brand and incorporate them into your about section copy.

‍7. Creating a social media calendar

Develop a monthly social media calendar that includes a posting schedule by the time of day and day of the week for each content type for each used social media platform. The goal is to consistently be top of mind for customers without inundating them with posts they ignore.

Best practices include establishing your general social media voice and tone and promptly responding to all comments and @mentions. Remember to optimize your content for each platform. Avoid reposting the exact same message across channels. For example, suppose you’re on three social media platforms and want to promote a product upgrade. Develop content about the promotion targeted to the audience on each social platform and schedule the content to post on three different days.  

Targeting better time to engage

Customer engagement is a critical asset that impacts customer acquisition and retention rates and even customer satisfaction. General platform posting days and times are a good starting place, but targeted personas can vary. The key is to determine what’s optimal for your target audience.

For example, suppose your target market is career-oriented working Millennials, and you’ve selected Facebook as your primary platform. Posting from 1 PM to 3 PM during the week—generally considered one of the best times to post on Facebook—might not be ideal for your audience. Instead, try posting during times when your audience is relaxing and has time to browse Facebook posts.

Use Facebook Business Suite’s Insights to gain insights into your posts such as engagement, follower demographic information, and the reach of your Facebook page.

8. Developing content and messaging that resonates

Content meant for Boomers or seniors will be different from content targeted to Millennials or Gen Z. Develop your brand’s social media content and messaging by carefully crafting content with the appropriate visuals, copy, messages, voice, and tone for your target audience.

Brand messaging

Develop messaging consistent with your brand identity and promise. Complement and support the tone and voice of your brand and blend it for different personas in your target audience. Be creative in how you fine-tune general messages for each platform and the audience on those platforms while staying consistent with your brand.

Content

Different platforms require different content. For example, a fun, engaging photo perfect for Instagram probably won’t resonate with business users on LinkedIn. Analyze reports indicating the best time to post your content by time, day, and even by month. If you know your target audience and locations, use this information to help determine optimal posting times.

Still, there are general times and days that tend to work best for each platform. For example, according to a Buffer study, the best time to post to Facebook is between 1 PM to 3 PM during the week and Saturdays. The best times to post on Instagram are lunchtime (11 AM to 1 PM) and evenings from 7 to 9 PM.

Content types include but are not limited to:

• Imagery: Social media posts with relevant imagery such as photos, graphics, and infographics boosts engagement. In addition to what you create, consider adding UGC (user-generated content) into the mix.
• Memes: Memes are static images often embellished with text, which tend to be humorous and spread rapidly through social media.
• Video: Short videos, no more than two to three minutes, do best on social media. Some platforms only allow specific video durations. Always check your platform video rules before creating videos. For instance, TikTok videos are limited to 60 seconds.
• Quotes: Quotes tend to be highly reshared on social media. Create your own or use a relevant quote from someone famous. Use hashtags wisely (not too many). When quoting someone else, always double-check your sources and make sure the quote is accurate.

9. Leveraging paid versus organic social

Organic social content is posted for free. From there, followers can share your posts, and their followers may share them, too, and so on. Paid social media is content you pay a social media platform to “boost,” i.e., advertise in feeds based on the audience(s) you decide to target using tools they provide. Companies typically choose a hybrid approach in their social media marketing strategy.

Paid social media

Organic social media takes time compared to the immediate increase in brand reach and awareness of paid ads. Unless you have an enormous following on a platform, consider boosting an ad to reach as many people in your target market as possible, whether you want to market a new product or service or increase brand awareness and build your follower base quickly. Paid social media can help you with these goals and more.

Let’s say you’ve launched a new product targeted to an audience under 30 years of age. By advertising with TikTok, you can access millions of potential leads depending on your ad spend. However, if your ads boost followers but don’t generate the leads you expect, adjust your plan. It’s essential to manage campaign costs and align return on ad spend (ROAS) and KPIs to achieve your projected ROI.

Organic social media strategy

Organic social media is low-cost because there’s no fee to post content once you’ve created it. The downside is that it can take a long time to accomplish a KPI such as lead generation when you depend on users and followers to share your posts.

But don’t overlook the importance of a robust organic strategy. For example, use it to improve your online presence, reputation, and social mentions and form a closer bond with your audience as well as influencers.

10. Testing the strategy and campaigns

Take the guesswork out of social media marketing by testing digital campaigns before full deployment. Use martech to try out concepts, compare assets, and make data-driven decisions. Run tests during a campaign and use the results to adjust assets for improved performance.

• Use A/B testing to compare a control version (group A) of a digital marketing asset to a variant (group B) and make adjustments based on results to improve performance.
• Multivariable testing A/B test with multiple variables instead of two. You’ll need a large audience to run multivariable tests successfully.
• Use split tests to test two content types based on a goal, but the two variants are often entirely different from A/B tests where the variation is minor.
• CTR testing is a simple way to test the potential success of various digital marketing assets. Test different content variations by assigning a unique UTM to each, then measure the CTR for each.  

Tip: Consider using influencers to test different campaigns.

‍11. Evolving the strategy

Shifting market conditions, changing competition, shifts in public sentiment, and new and emerging social media platforms means your social media strategy must be ever-evolving. Adopt a process of evaluation, collaboration, management, adaptation, and evolution. Look at changes, trends, and projections. Evaluate your current strategy and develop new ways to make minor adjustments when needed, but don’t be afraid of a wholesale strategy overhaul if the market dictates it. Use metrics and data from current marketing campaigns to learn and make adjustments—constantly perfecting and forming new strategies. Analyze your competitors’ products or services and marketing strategies. Be on the lookout for new entrants and market disruptors.

Conclusion

In a highly competitive marketplace where customers value building relationships with brands they like, a social media strategy is an essential part of your marketing effort. Your strategy should include best practices and the use of marketing automation tools to help you plan, execute, and monitor your social media marketing plans so you can make informed data-driven decisions that deliver ROI.

If your in-house marketing team doesn’t have the bandwidth or expertise required to develop a social media strategy or monitor and manage every aspect of your social media campaigns, consider engaging social media marketers through a work marketplace like Upwork.

Upwork is not affiliated with and does not sponsor or endorse any of the tools or services discussed in this section. These tools and services are provided only as potential options, and each reader and company should take the time needed to adequately analyze and determine the tools or services that would best fit their specific needs and situation.