How to develop a successful ‘ social ’ media strategy

Being active on social media with your business goes beyond simply posting updates. There’s a whole strategy behind it. Why does one post work whilst another doesn’t? Time for a quick masterclass! social

Do you know your target audience?

To achieve the right goals, it’s important to be active on the platforms where your target audience is. It sounds very logical, but in practice we often see companies active on platforms where their target audience isn’t to be found. So don’t be active on Instagram simply because you ‘want to do something with Instagram’; instead, think carefully about who you can reach there.

Of course, it may be the case that your company has multiple target audiences or that your target audience is active across multiple platforms. If this is the case, be sure to adapt your approach accordingly. Only then can you truly know whether you are reaching your target audience.

What is the aim?

Once you’ve decided which platforms you want to be on, it’s important to think about what you want to post. Put yourself in your target audience’s shoes: why would they want to follow your company on social media? Many organisations find it difficult to constantly come up with new things to post on social media. This is the wrong mindset anyway, because you shouldn’t post just for the sake of posting. Post something with a purpose! Decide in advance what you want to achieve with social media marketing. Here are a few examples:

• Increasing brand awareness
• Client retention
• More website visitors
• Reputation monitoring
• Recruiting new staff
• Attracting new clients

Work based on fixed themes

If you know what you want to achieve with social media, it’s important to think carefully about how you’re going to reach your goals. There are various ways to do this. To keep things simple, we recommend using fixed, recurring themes that you can adapt to suit your own needs. Of course, the themes you can work with really depend on the type of business. To give you some inspiration, let’s take a fashion webshop as an example.

• New items in the spotlight
• Bestseller of the week
• Happy customer
• Styling tips
• Trends

You can incorporate these themes on a weekly basis, making it easier to develop the content you post on social media. Use a content calendar. This will help you maintain an overview and work consistently.

Ensuring diversity

Ensure a diversity of content. In your social media strategy, pay attention to the various forms of communication. So think carefully about text, video, banners and so on. Different objectives may call for different forms of communication. So make sure to factor this into your strategy.

Length of a message

It’s also important to think carefully about the length of your post. The ideal length of a post varies slightly depending on the platform. Bear in mind, however, that there’s a caveat here. One post may require more explanation than another. And one video may perform better if it’s longer than a very short one. So always bear this in mind when posting your social media post.

• Facebook: between 40 and 80 characters long
• Instagram: use a maximum of 120 characters
• LinkedIn: the longer, the better – bear in mind that your post is no longer fully readable after 16–25 characters and you’ll need to click ‘show more’.
• Pinterest: a description accompanying the visual, of around 180–200 characters
• YouTube: anything under three minutes performs well.
• TikTok: videos with the highest engagement are around 15 seconds long

Get to know the algorithm

For each platform, it is also important to understand the algorithm of the medium in question. As the algorithm is constantly changing and, in many cases, its accuracy has never really been proven, we recommend that you carry out plenty of testing. What works and what doesn’t? On LinkedIn, for example, long posts often perform better than short ones. Furthermore, when people quickly ‘like’ and comment on a post, your content is shown more frequently.

Statistics

Naturally, you’ll want to see how your content is performing. That’s why we recommend keeping a close eye on the statistics. Learn from them and adapt accordingly. What’s more, you can promote high-performing content where necessary. This way, you’ll create an even wider reach.

Advertising

When it comes to social advertising , there are also plenty of options. Here, it’s important that you (once again) think carefully about your objective. What do you want to achieve with the advert? Do you want to attract new customers? Do you want to raise brand awareness for your business? Or do you want to reach people who have already visited your website? You should also think carefully about which platform will help you achieve this objective.

Is the advert live? You’re not there yet. Keep a close eye on the advert and see how it’s performing. Where necessary, you can test multiple adverts, for example by carrying out A/B tests.

Would you like to set up your own ‘ social ’ media strategy?

We could go into much greater detail about developing your social media strategy, but a great deal of it is bespoke. So, could you do with some targeted advice from our social media marketers? If so, please do get in touch. We’d be happy to help, take a close look at your social channels and explore the opportunities for social media success.