Social media is an ever-changing landscape that, for many whom did not grow up with it, can feel overwhelming. On top of algorithms constantly changing and new platforms, there is a need for creativity, which, for people who are not focused on creativity, can easily be a burn out. Finding a way to make social media work for you is the key to taking your business to the next level. It isn’t always easy, but once you figure out the system that works best for you, the rest is just rinse and repeat. It is important to note that this is not implying whether or not social media is worth it – because it is. This is about how to make social media a business enhancer and not a dragging anchor.

Social media strategy varies from platform to platform based on what each platform “rewards”. This just means each platform decides certain aspects of posts are more important than others. These factors typically go hand in hand with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) best practices. For example, things that apps can reward are hashtag usage, amount of posting, posting times, engagement, engagement with other posts, tags, and caption length. Often, platforms don’t overlap with what is the highest rewarded aspect. The most popular social media platforms currently are:

• TikTok – the benefit to TikTok is that the ability to become viral is much easier than many of the other platforms. The con to that is that brands need to be prepared for the possibility and have a plan to maintain brand salience.
• Instagram – this is a great reference point for consistency and an understanding of the brand overall. This could be considered the modern-day Yelp for all businesses.
• YouTube – This platform is great for long-form content, specifically videos. It is much harder to gain mass traction on this platform but the traction that is gained is typically long-term engagement and loyalty to the brand.
• Facebook – although for the day-to-day, this platform is not always the best, it is a great platform for managing brand hosted events, creating community forums and reaching older demographics of customers.

Road Map

The first part of setting up brand strategy on social media is to set goals. Are you looking to create a community, become more personable with the consumer, build a larger community, or use social media as a paid ad platform meant for only selling things? Further, you need to decide what platforms (or if all) are best for the manpower and goals set for social media. Once that is decided, each platform needs to be designated its own niche. Viewers are not going to follow the TikTok, Instagram and YouTube if it is all the same content that’s just been cut and split into different platforms. For example, if YouTube is the prime social media platform that is going to be used but TikTok is secondary, save all the Behind the scenes (BTS) clips for TikTok or film a “day in my life” on video filming days. This helps create follower conversion which is extremely important for making sure a brand is always on their feed, but in different versions so they will be more likely to engage with the content. Creating a PowerPoint that breaks down each platform and the overall goals can also be extremely helpful for a point of reference for the team and content. Once these goals and niches are determined, posting become less overwhelming of what to post and where.

Market Research

It is clear when a brand doesn’t do their market research. There is this stigma that people feel that everything must be so original and unheard of that often the posts and strategy becomes unrelatable to the brand’s consumers. This is not to say that brands should copy other people; things should still be unique, but not forced. Creating overly produced content often does not sit well with consumers. Consumers want to feel as though they are welcomed and can relate to the brands they are putting their money towards – extremely curated and forced content is typically not successful unless the company is focused on selling something within the film, photography or art space where this is expected. Looking up competitors within the brand’s space is extremely important for being able to gauge what they are already doing so that your client’s brands aren’t putting out too similar content, but it also helps to see what is and is not working for those companies by looking at the engagement on their posts. For someone who is brand new to social media or is unsure where to begin on certain platforms, this is a great place to start. This can also help identify if there is a gap in the market that can be filled with a brand’s content. All these things are extremely helpful for adding to a master doc or PowerPoint to help funnel ideas to each platform.

Scheduling

One of the largest complaints about social media is that consistency is required, and people find it time consuming or overwhelming to figure out what to film and how it should be filmed or captured and then edited. The great thing about this problem is that it is a time management issue which is a very easy fix. One thing many content creators do that brands can do as well is “batch” their content. This means (if you use a weekly basis) that once a week, they spend the day filming all the content needed for the week and then sit down and edit it. Depending on the type of content this could take anywhere from 2-5 hours. On a larger scale this can be done for every 2 weeks if a brand sits down to film and edit 1-1.5 days every two weeks. For people and brands who have no help with social media and cannot take multiple days of the month out to do social media, this is when brands take an entire weekend out at the beginning of the month or before an upcoming month to plan out and shoot and edit all their content for the entire month. This includes taking any photos or videos, editing, creating captions and often saving content as drafts so the posts are either automatically posted at their allotted times or the only thing the brand must do is hit “post” on the specified day.  Luckily, this can be organized in Google Calendar or project management websites like Asana. Even further, Asana can be used in tandem with websites like Hootsuite or Sprout Social which are great options for individual or team social media organization needs.

Engagement

Posting the right content doesn’t matter if no one is seeing it. Everyone must start somewhere, but keeping track of post engagement can help brands track within their own strategy what is working and what is not. This is extremely important for creating more content based on what consumers want to see. For example, a restaurant wouldn’t keep pushing the same featured dish each week if no one was ordering it, so why would you do that with content. Tracking your content can also be easy with the websites/apps listed above. Also, almost all the social media apps have their own in-app “insights” tab where they have limited but available engagement data. This is often only available if an account is considered “business” or “creator”.

Engagement is even more important on the larger scale of campaigns and social media strategy. Engagement is like a resume for brands and their audience. Larger companies and influencers are more willing to work with brands that can show proof that they aren’t wasting their time and energy promoting something that does nothing for them. This also works in reverse when asking other brands for their engagement stats to decide whether the engagement they receive along with the market they would be targeting is worth your own time. Being able to collect, read and understand social media engagement also helps determine what posts do and do not work. This helps navigate a brand’s social media strategy plan.