A Practical Guide To Mapping Out Your Social Media Strategy

Photo by Karla Vidal on Unsplash

In this article, we’ll delve deeper into the specifics of building your own social media strategy. If you’ve yet to read our previous piece on the 5 Main Pillars of Social Media Marketing, do check that out first as this will be a follow-up article.

Now, part of our job as a social media agency is to strategize and advise clients on how to effectively manage their social media presence. These are the things that we take into account before even creating any content.

Defining your target audience

Here’s a quick definition:

“Your target audience is the ideal customer you want to attract to your product or service through your marketing efforts.”

Source: CoSchedule

Start by asking yourself these questions to narrow down your target audience:

• What pain points do my products or services solve?
• What’s the profile of my existing customers?
• What qualities do my customers have in common?
• Why did these customers choose us, instead of our competitor?

Once you’ve got these questions answered, it’s time to come up with your target audience statement:

{Company name} creates content for {target audience}, so they can {achieve desired outcome}.

For instance, here’s ours:

Appiloque creates content for marketing professionals, so that they can learn about industry best practices and improve their business performance digitally.

The desired outcome that you should aim for should always be something that’s beneficial to your target audience. It should never be “so they can buy our products or services”.

Sure, all businesses want to drive sales (let’s be realistic, a business is a profit-motivated entity). But hold your horses — are you looking to drive sales immediately after publishing a piece of content? That’s not going to happen.

Add value first, and a sale will come along as a by-product.

Now that you’ve defined your target audience, the next step is to decide on your social media platforms.

Focusing on selective platforms

It’s best not to overextend yourself by posting on a multitude of platforms for the sole purpose of covering all bases. Instead, choose anywhere from one to three platforms, so your content is more focused and streamlined.

Each platform’s algorithms and audiences differ in preferences and behaviors. Unless you have a tremendous amount of resources to spare, catering your content for too many platforms will detract from your execution.

If you’re on the fence on which platform to select, here’s a quick summary that we’ve compiled for 3 of the most popular social media platforms in Singapore: Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram.

Facebook:

• Great for B2C products
• 77% of B2C marketers have successfully acquired a customer through Facebook
• Geared towards news and entertainment, so keep content educational and entertaining
• Run marketing campaigns and promotions: 42% of Facebook fans will like a page to get a discount while 35% of Facebook fans will like a page just to join a contest.
• Tip: We like combining contests or promotions with a landing page to collect email addresses — it increases your ROI through future outreach opportunities, via email marketing.

LinkedIn:

• Great for B2B service providers
• 65% of B2B firms have successfully acquired a client through LinkedIn
• Focus on industry insights, interesting data, and to-the-point post captions

Instagram:

• Great for visual brands targeting a younger audience
• 75% of Instagram users are between the ages of 18 and 24, and 90% of users are younger than 35.
• More than a third of users purchased a product online on their mobile phone — which is 70% more likely than non-users.
• Use the platform to showcase the human side of your brand with storytelling, behind-the-scenes, and user-generated content

Crafting your brand’s personality, tone & voice

Think about world-famous brands like Nike and Porsche — their personalities virtually ooze out from every facet of their advertising and marketing.

Nike, for instance, is fierce and competitive, while Porsche is sophisticated and smooth.

Notice that those traits are human qualities — you too, should ascribe these kinds of attributes to your brand.

Here are some questions to get you started:

• What kind of personality would your brand have if it were a person?
• What relationship would your brand have with a customer if it were a person?
• Use adjectives to describe what your brand’s personality is not.
• List down any other brands that have a similar personality to yours, and why do you think so.

These are actual questions that we ask our clients at the start of any social media project. We then take the information gathered, and create a social media style guide.

These are examples of the things that you’d find within each style guide:

• Moodboard
• Colour palette
• Typography styles
• Visual samples
• Tone of voice
• Copywriting formatting
• Emoji usage
• Hashtag usage

Having a style guide is extremely helpful if you’re serious about social media and planning to generate content at scale. Brand consistency is key across all content, and having a reference to fall back on is a huge time saver.

Strategizing your content

What kind of content will you share?

We’ve talked about content pillars previously — coming up with general content themes first will help you shape your individual pieces of content.

Here’s an example: If you sell kitchen appliances, start with the term ‘kitchen,’ then break it down into sub-categories such as kitchen renovations, home improvement, and cooking recipes.

Each of these could very well function as a content pillar. These general topics that are adjacent to your products will allow for content flexibility, yet stay relevant to the target audience of a kitchen appliance company.

Scout the competition for content that works

Nothing quite compares to the insights you can garner from the social media feeds of your competitors.

Follow two to five competitor feeds on the leading platforms we’ve already discussed, then assess what kind of post formats (videos, images, articles etc.) and content topics generate the most post engagements.

You share an audience with these brands, so what works for them might work for your company. There’s no need to try and reinvent the wheel, but neither should you rip them off directly. Instead, put your unique spin on the types of posts with proven success.

Deciding on post frequency

Consistency is king when establishing a strong social media presence.

However, there’s a stark difference between consistent posting and spam. Overdo it, and you’ll irritate your audience and risk losing followers as a result.

For a quick overview on the best practices, here’s the research-backed recommendation:

• Facebook: 1–2 posts per day
• Instagram: 1–2 posts per day
• Instagram Stories: 8–16 Stories, twice per week
• LinkedIn: 1–2 posts per day

Get strategic advice from a social media agency

There’s a lot that a business can achieve with a well-planned social media strategy, and we’ll be delving deeper into other components such as social media advertising, community management, and analytics in our next few guides.

If you’re considering hiring a social media agency at this point in time, check out this article on the things you should look out for, before entering a partnership.

And if you’ve previously dabbled into social media but didn’t achieve the results you wanted, reach out to us! We’d love to learn more about your business and see what we can do to help :)

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