5 Secrets of A Successful Social Strategy

If your social media efforts feel stagnant, you’re not alone. To help, we’ve compiled a few secrets that keep social media strategies on-edge, engaging, and ultimately successful.

Stop me if this story sounds familiar. You’ve been running some combination of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and (if you’re truly bold) Snapchat for your company. You create monthly content calendars. You plug in the usual content ideas (news, articles, holidays). You create monthly reports with some brief analysis and recommendations. You move on.

For years, brands were bombarded with this pressure to simply just be on social media. Figuring out your strategy was almost an afterthought. Now, amidst the ever-changing social landscape, your digital marketing strategy has become the most important piece possible.

Yet too often we’ve found that companies treat these strategies as sacred text, like they were carved in stone and belong in a museum. Today’s landscape requires flexibility and an agile, experimental mindset. A social strategy needs to embrace change and speed—a shift in approach that can easily happen using a few social strategy secrets.

1) Build The Best Possible Audience Persona

There’s a line in the classic early aughts movie High Fidelity that has always stuck with me.

“It’s not what you’re like, it’s what you like. Movies, books, these things matter.”

To a certain extent, this line is also a good model for how to approach building an ideal audience persona.

You don’t want to just know their age, location, and gender—you want to know their favorite TV show, their favorite sports team, and what magazines they read. All of these insights will help you in brainstorming content that you know has a better chance of grabbing your audience’s attention. Facebook’s Audience Insights tool is a great place to start for building your audience personas out.

2) Don’t Be Afraid of Focusing on One or Two Channels

This might be the toughest one to adhere to, but can make a world of difference in streamlining efforts. Take a step back and look at your goals alongside your shiny, new audience persona. Where do they actually spend most of their time? Is it more so on Instagram than Facebook? Is it mostly on Snapchat?

Pick the most impactful channels and stick to them. Sure, it’s easy to point out that almost 80% of everyone on the internet has a Facebook account and that their targeting capabilities are the most robust, but if you’re audience isn’t active there, you’re simply yelling into an abyss.

3) Speak The Channel’s Language

Nothing leads to quicker social complacency than what I call the Triple C: Constant Content Crossover. It’s when you go to an Instagram account and see the same post (image and verbiage) as you just saw on Twitter. And then you check Facebook later and there it is…again. This approach does a disservice to the opportunities each social media channel presents.

Instagram’s visual-first approach offers a completely different canvas from LinkedIn’s professionally-polished landscape. Twitter’s die hard users speak in a compact syntax that is inherently unique to their specific field of interest, while Facebook is a competition for the most clever visual billboard. Tailor your content to best utilize the idiosyncrasies of each channel to more authentically reach your desired audience.

4) Stay Consistent & Experiment

Yes, this header is contradictory to itself. And yes, I did it on purpose. In order to maximize your social impact, you need to think of your content like a TV guide. Programatic content can go along way in building expectations and reliability with your audience. Look no further than the creation of #TBT or Wisdom Wednesdays for examples of this. But, within these timing expectations, you should be always open to trying new things. New stickers or features on Instagram stories? Use them ASAP. New video capabilities on Facebook Live? Start recording.

Too often brands are hyper hesitant to be the first into the proverbial new feature pool, when really this is the best opportunity to appear on-trend and gain key insights and learnings on best practices for new content. Know that even with the biggest budget, you will still be learning from your first attempt at anything new on social media, so stay ready to try new things constantly.

5) Keep Analyzing & Adjusting

Now that you have these new ideas and inspiration to create kick-ass social media content, you’re probably all jacked to get those umbrellas out for a hurricane-esque brainstorm. Before the creativity Kool-Aid goes overboard, I will urge for you to think of all these new ideas with specific goals or actions in mind. Approach new ideas like science experiments. What do you think will be the outcome? What are the variables? What actually happened? Rinse and repeat. You should be constantly using data to inform your creative efforts on social, even with new features or content efforts. This doesn’t mean keeping everything on a short leash. Sometimes traction requires a tough level of patience, and every initiative has a different timeline.

The importance of having an impactful approach to social media marketing continues to grow each year, both in mobile developments and the scale of reach within these networks. Using these strategic tenets, your brand can create engaging and authentic channels that reward both your customers and your internal business objectives. Just don’t forget who told you the secrets to success.

Looking for more social media success? We at Moncur pride ourselves on being able to help create social media success for our clients. Drop us a line today.