How To Build Your Social Media Strategy (Step-By-Step)
Planning your social media strategy but not sure where to start? I’ve got you covered.
In this post, I’ll show you how to create a winning social media marketing strategy for any brand, in 12 simple steps.
Your strategy will serve as the blueprint for all your future social media marketing activities. It’ll guide everything you do from here on out, so it’s important to get it right.
With that in mind, here’s how to get started…
Step 1: Determine your goals
Step number one is to determine the goals of your social media activities—what is it you’re trying to achieve?
Vague statements like ‘to grow my social media presence’ aren’t going to cut it here.
You need to set S.M.A.R.T. objectives, which means they need to be five things: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.
The way I like to approach this is to start with the wider business goals and work backward from there.
For example, let’s say you’re managing the socials of an ecommerce website that sells products. And that the brand’s main business goal for this quarter is to increase their sales.
In that case, one of your social media goals might be to drive a certain amount of clicks to their product pages from Instagram. Or to refer to a certain number of sales from Pinterest.
Another business’s goals might look different. For example, a charity might prioritize building brand awareness. In that case, your social media objectives might be to increase your social share of voice or brand mentions.
Alternatively, the business’s main goal might be to improve customer care & satisfaction. In that case, your social media goals might be to increase brand sentiment on social or improve your team’s social media response times.
See how it works? You need to figure out how to align your social media goals with the broader business objectives.
By the way, big brands often use different social sets for different goals. For example, Nike has several Twitter profiles, including @Nike for building brand awareness and @Nikestore for driving sales.
Matching your goals to metrics and KPIs
When determining the goals of your social media campaign, you also need to consider how you’re going to measure your progress toward them.
And that means figuring out what metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) you need to track.
Here are some examples of common social media goals and the metrics that go with them.
| Social media goal | Relevant metrics & KPIs |
| Increase brand awareness | Reach, post impressions, follower growth rate, brand mention volume, social share of voice, hashtag usage |
| Drive website traffic | Click-through rate (CTR), referral traffic, bounce rate |
| Generate leads/sales/conversions | Click-through rate, conversion rate, cost per lead (CPL), form submissions, sales |
| Increase social engagement | Likes, comments, shares, saves, average engagement rate, total interactions |
| Improve customer support & satisfaction | Response time, response rate, resolution rate, customer satisfaction score (CSAT), and brand sentiment. |
| Increase paid social media ROI | ROI, cost per click (CPC), cost per acquisition (CPA) |
| Expand audience reach | New followers, share of voice, follower growth rate, audience demographics |
Step 2: Identify your target audience
You understand what your goals are. The next step is to understand who you’re trying to reach through your social media marketing campaigns.
This matters as your target audience is going to inform every part of your social media strategy, from the kind of messaging and tone of voice you use in your content, to the platforms you focus on.
For example, if you’re trying to reach younger, 18-19 year olds on social, then you’re probably going to be focusing on platforms like TikTok and Instagram. You’re probably going to be posting memes, paying attention to pop culture and trends, and generally aiming to stay culturally relevant.
In contrast, if you’re targeting more mature users, you’re going to take a very different approach.
To identify your target audience, ask yourself (or the brand whose socials you’re managing) questions like:
- Who is my existing audience on social? (dig into your analytics to view your top audience demographics)
- Who is my business’s ideal customer / who am I trying to reach?
- Where do they live?
- What age are they?
- What gender are they?
- What interests/hobbies do they have?
- How much do they earn?
- What pain points & problems do they have?
- What kind of content do they engage with?
The goal is to find out as much as you can and put that together to create a detailed buyer persona that you can refer back to when planning the rest of your strategy.
If you have the budget for it, a good way to find out more about your target audience is to conduct market research through social listening, online surveys, focus groups, interviews, polls, and feedback forms can help you to research your target audience.
But that isn’t necessary if you’re a small brand or influencer and you don’t have the resources for it. Speaking of which…
Step 3: Assess your resources & budget
Next, you need to assess the resources you have to devote to social media as that’s going to determine the scope of your strategy.
By resources, I mean three things:
- How much time can you afford to spend on social media?
- How much money can you afford to spend on social media?
- How many people do you have helping you?
If you’re managing the socials for a big brand, you’ll probably have a whole social media team at your disposal.
You’ll be able to delegate tasks to different team members. So, you can afford to be more ambitious in your strategy. For example, you might target multiple platforms and set a more aggressive posting schedule.
On the other hand, if you’re managing your own socials, or you work for a smaller brand or startup with a limited budget, you might have to handle everything yourself. You’ll be the social media strategist, account manager, writer, graphic designer, and so on.
In that case, you’re going to have to make some choices. For example, you probably won’t be able to post several times a day to a bunch of different platforms, so you’ll be best off focusing your efforts on just one or two.
And that brings us neatly onto the next step…
Step 4: Choose your platforms
Now, you know what your goals are. You know who you’re trying to reach. You know what resources you have available.
Factoring all that in, it’s time to pick the specific social media networks you’re going to be focusing the bulk of your social media efforts on and what you’re going to use them for.
Examples:
- “We will use Facebook to run paid ads and drive website traffic”
- “We will use X for customer support to reduce call volumes”
- “We will use LinkedIn for recruitment and employee advocacy”.
Remember that in most cases, if you try to target every social network at once, you’re probably going to be spread too thin. It’s usually better to go all-in on a couple of platforms that best align with your goals and target audience.
To help you work out which ones you want to focus on, let’s take a look at some of the leading social media platforms out there and explore what their top demographics and use cases are.
Note: You can also check out our roundup of social media statistics for more information about the different social networks and how users interact with them.
Facebook is the largest social media platform in the world by monthly active users, with the biggest advertising audience. It’s a good place to reach all demographics, but more mature users.
It’s also essential for brick-and-mortar businesses that need to target customers in their local area. And ads on Facebook perform particularly well thanks to its powerful targeting options.
You can also add a chatbot to your Facebook page, which makes it a good platform for customer service.
Blogging Wizard uses their Facebook page to share and drive traffic to their latest blog posts. They also regularly share entertaining and informative Facebook Reels to help grow their audience.
See the top Facebook video statistics.
Instagram is another one of the largest social networks in the world. It’s a highly visual platform, which makes it a good place to highlight and show off your products.
You can use Instagram Shopping to make sales directly on the app or use it to drive traffic to your store. Ads on Instagram also perform well, and Instagram is without a doubt one of the best platforms for influencer marketing.
@MISSGUIDED is an example of a brand that’s killing it on Instagram. They use the app to draw attention to their women’s apparel products and drive sales, and their Instagram page has been a huge hit, racking up over 8.5 million followers to date.
X (Twitter)
X (formerly Twitter) is a text-based social media platform with a large user base. It can be a good platform for distributing brand news/announcements and offering customer support.
However, it’s not as popular as platforms like Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok for videos and other visual content.
It’s also faced a lot of controversy in recent years due to concerns about misinformation and hate speech, which has led many brands to pull out of advertising on the platform.
As such, you might want to consider whether or not X aligns with your brand values when deciding if it has a place in your strategy.
@JetBlue is known as one of the most successful brands on X. They’ve mastered the art of writing compelling, engaging, and entertaining Tweets that farm interactions, and they’ve gained over 1.8 million followers so far.
Pinterest is another highly visual social media platform. It serves as an idea board where users can share and discover inspiration for things like recipes, home decor, fashion, and exciting products.
Pinterest is one of the best platforms for driving traffic to your store. It’s also a good place to show off your products.
LinkedIn is a social networking site tailored towards industry professionals. Users use LinkedIn to network with other professionals, connect with colleagues, find jobs, and learn new skills.
It’s a great platform to include in your strategy if you’re a B2B business. It also makes sense to use LinkedIn if some of the goals of your social media strategy include recruitment or employee advocacy.
YouTube
YouTube is the second largest social network after Facebook with over 2 billion users. It’s a good place to share both long-form and short-form videos.
It has excellent discovery features, which makes it a good place to build an audience from scratch.
See the top YouTube Shorts statistics.
TikTok
TikTok is a popular short-form video app and social network that caters mainly to younger demographics. It’s a great platform to focus on if you’re targeting Gen Z users in your social media strategy.
Step 5: Audit & optimize your existing profiles
Once you’ve chosen the social media platforms you want to focus on, it’s time to audit your existing profiles and pages on those platforms.
Start by evaluating your social media bios.
- Are all your bio descriptions consistently branded?
- Do they contain clear call-to-actions that align with your goals (e.g. a link to your website if your goal is to drive traffic)?
- Are they optimized for search with niche-relevant keywords?
- Do you have a verified badge next to your profile name?
- Have you added links to all your other socials?
If you see room for improvement, now is the time to optimize it.
After that, evaluate your past content and strategy.
- What has been done on each account so far?
- Which of your posts have been most effective?
- Which have been the least effective?
- Do posts shared at a particular time of day tend to perform better than others?
- What kind of tone of voice have you used in posts so far? Do you have a defined color palette/visual aesthetic?
- Are there any post formats you’ve been neglecting (e.g. on Instagram, have you tried posting Reels and Stories or stuck exclusively to image posts)?
All of this is going to help inform how you approach your new content strategy going forward (which we’ll plan in a couple of steps).
One final thing worth doing in this step, particularly if you’re managing the socials of a big-name brand or influencer, is to check for impostors.
Are there any other accounts on the platform with the same or a similar name to yours? Could users confuse your brand for theirs? If so, take steps to rectify this now as it may impact your results later down the line.
Step 6: Conduct competitor analysis
Competitor analysis is the last bit of research you’re going to need to do before you can start putting together a cohesive social strategy.
In this stage, the goal is to find out who your main competitors are, and what they’re doing in the social space.
You can do this manually by going through their socials to uncover useful insights. Alternatively, use a competitor analysis or social media analytics tool to extract the important data for you.
The kind of insights we’re looking for here are:
- What social media platforms are my competitors using?
- What’s their average engagement rate, follower count, etc?
- How often are they posting content?
- What kinds of posts are they sharing?
- Which of their previous posts have performed well? Which ones flopped? And why?
- What’s the tone and voice of their messaging?
- How have they branded their pages and profiles?
- Do they run paid ads or only post organic content?
- What influencers/creators do they collaborate with?
- How do they engage with their followers?
Make notes on the above, and you can begin to reverse-engineer their social strategy, adopting the best bits for your own campaign and doing away with things that aren’t working.
Note: My post on Instagram analytics tools has a bunch of tools you can use to help with this research.
Step 7: Plan your content strategy
Now we’re getting to the fun part. We’re going to start to put together a content strategy.
Your content strategy tells you what kind of content you’re going to be posting on social media. There are a couple of components to a good content strategy, so let’s go through each of them
Plan your content mix
Your content mix is the strategic combination of different types of posts that you plan to post to keep your social feeds fresh, varied, and engaging. A good content mix should be well-rounded and cover a variety of different topics and post formats.
I’d recommend opening up a spreadsheet and drafting a separate content mix for each social media platform you plan to focus on.
Start by deciding on what formats you’re going to be posting. For example, for Instagram, you probably don’t only want to post single-image posts to your feed every day. Instead, you might opt for something like this:
- 30% Short-form videos (i.e. Reels)
- 30% Carousel posts
- 20% Single-image posts
- 10% Instagram Stories
- 10% Live broadcasts
Once you’ve planned the different post formats, you also need to plan the mix of different content types you’re going to post.
For example, you probably don’t want to only share posts that promote your products every day—social media audiences don’t like to be advertised to 24/7. Instead, you’ll also want to include some entertaining content, engaging content, etc.
With that in mind, your content mix might look something like this:
- 30% fun or entertaining content (e.g. memes, funny videos, etc.)
- 20% informative content (e.g. blog post links, educational content, tips, etc.)
- 20% promotional content (e.g. product announcements & showcases, discounts/offers, etc.)
- 10% engagement content (e.g. live Q&A sessions, polls and surveys, giveaways/contests)
- 10% curated industry content (e.g. links to studies, industry news, etc.)
- 10% inspirational content (e.g. motivational quotes, case studies, etc.)
Lastly, you might want to make some notes on the different topics you’re going to cover in your content. For example, if you’re a fitness brand, topics could include:
- Nutrition
- Weightlifting
- Cardio
- Yoga
- Mindfulness
Bonus tip: Need some inspiration to help you plan your content mix? See our list of 42 social media post ideas to boost your brand.
Create brand style guidelines
Brand style guidelines help to ensure you stay consistent with your branding across all your social media posts.
They’re super important, especially if you’re working alongside a team as it helps make sure everyone is on the same page.
Your brand style guidelines should include both guidance for written content and visuals.
The written style guidelines might include notes on things like:
- Tone of voice. Should posts be written in a professional tone or more casual? Energetic and upbeat or somber and serious?
- Brand identity. What’s your mission statement? What are the core values you want to communicate? What’s your brand personality?
- Language & terminology. What key phrases, slogans, and social media hashtags should be used? What words, if any, should be avoided?
- Grammar and punctuation. Should your brand name always be capitalized? Should writers use em dashes in place of hyphens?
- Post length. How long should posts and captions be on different platforms?
- Emojis. Should posts include emojis? Are there any specific ones to include/avoid?
Visual guidelines should include notes on things like:
- Logo usage. Should designers add logos to your social media posts? Where should it be positioned? Are there variations for different backgrounds (e.g. colored, black-and-white, etc.)?
- Color palette. What colors should designers use in social media posts? This helps to create a cohesive aesthetic on your feed. You might want to provide a color palette template or specific hex code or RGB values.
- Typography. What fonts should be used for headlines and body text, and when? How should they be spaced and positioned?
- Watermarking. Should designers add watermarks to certain images or video posts? Where should they appear?
- Accessibility. Should videos include captions? Should designers use contrasting colors for readability? What about alt text?
- Templates. Are there specific templates you want to use for different types of posts?
Compile all of the above into a document that you can share with your team, or refer back to yourself. You might also want to include examples of do’s and don’ts to help give your team a clearer understanding of what you’re looking for.
Step 8: Set a posting schedule
Now you’ve planned what you’re going to be posting on social, the next step is to plan when you’re going to share those posts.
I’d recommend using a social media scheduling like SocialBee for this.
It has a built-in content calendar so you can map out your entire posting schedule for the year way in advance, and the tool will auto-publish each post for you on the dates/times you set.
It’s collaborative, so you can work alongside your team too. And you can organize your posts into categories (based on the content mix you planned in the last step), and then queue up whole groups of posts at once.
For example, you can set it so that your meme posts for Instagram get shared every Wednesday at 2 PM, and your promotional Reels get shared every Friday at 5 PM. You get the idea. This makes everything a lot faster and more efficient.
It’s up to you how often you post, and that will largely depend on the resources you have to work with. But ideally, I’d recommend aiming to publish posts at least a few times a week on each platform you’re active on.
The time and days you post will have a big impact on your post reach and engagement too—you should always try to share posts when your audience is most active. However, that time will be different for every creator.
Again, a social media scheduler tool like SocialBee will be able to help with this. It can automatically calculate your personal best time to post to each platform based on your historical data, and you can feed that back into your posting schedule.
Step 9: Plan your engagement strategy
Now you’ve planned your posts, the next step is to plan your engagement strategy. This is the part of your social media marketing plan where you outline how you’re going to interact with your audience on social.
Engagement is crucial for fostering closer relationships with your followers and building a community around your brand. Plus, engaging with your audience will indirectly help boost your post reach and visibility by encouraging users to like, comment, and share.
Here’s how to go about planning your engagement strategy…
Set engagement goals
Set some clear engagement goals to guide how often you interact with your audience. The scope of your goals will depend on how much time you have available and how many people (if any) you have on your team to help.
For example, if you’re going at it alone, you might aim to respond to at least 3 comments on every social media post you make.
If you have a customer care team, you could set much bigger goals. For example, you could aim to respond to every brand mention you get across social media.
Establish a response time
Set a standard for how quickly you or your team will respond to comments and messages. For example, a lot of brands try to respond to DMs on social within 24 hours during office hours.
A good social media management tool can help with this by streamlining your operations and automating repetitive processes.
For example, SocialBee’s engagement module pulls all your comments, messages, and DMs into organized streams of interactions for easier responses.
You and your team can monitor and respond from a single social dashboard across multiple platforms.
Set communication guidelines
If you’re working with a team, create guidelines for social media communications. You want to make sure every team member uses your brand’s tone of voice. For example, do you want to come across as professional, empathetic, or friendly? Consistency is key.
Your communication guidelines might also provide guidance on how to respond to complaints. For example, is there an escalation process?
It might include templates and saved replies for common queries to improve efficiency and consistency. You get the idea.
Consider your engagement tactics
It’s not just about how you reply to your audience on social. Your engagement strategy should also map out the other tactics you plan to use to boost engagement.
For example, you might want to plan to:
- Engage with user content. You might set targets to share, like, or comment on a certain number of posts from your target audience or existing followers each week. This can help you to grow your following and build stronger relationships with your audience.
- Run interactive challenges and contests. You might set targets to run a contest or giveaway challenge at a set interval, e.g. once weekly, in which you encourage your followers to participate to boost engagement.
- Polls, surveys, and other interactive features. You might want to post polls, surveys, questions, etc. to generate engagement. For example, you can use interactive stickers in your Instagram Stories to interact with your followers.
- Livestreams. Most social media platforms let you go live and interact with your audience in real time. You might want to set targets to run a certain number of livestreams each week/month/year.
Consider social listening
Social listening tools can ‘listen out’ for mentions of your brand or target keywords across social media and notify you about them.
It might be worth using one of these tools as part of your engagement strategy. Doing so will allow you to:
- Jump in on important conversations. If someone is talking about your brand, you can jump in on the conversation to engage with that user and add value.
- Respond to complaints quickly. If someone mentions your brand negatively, you’ll be notified and can respond to the complaint to mitigate the damage to your reputation.
- Discover brand advocates & influencers. Social listening can help you find the accounts that are already talking about your brand, so you can reach out to them to explore influencer marketing opportunities.
Step 10: Consider paid ads & influencer collaborations
At this point, you should have the bulk of your organic social media strategy in place.
Now, depending on your budget, you might want to expand it to include paid social media strategies.
The first thing to consider is whether or not you want to run social media ads. Ads are great if you want to generate results quickly but obviously, they eat into your budget, so you’ll need to weigh that up against your goals.
If you do plan to run ads, start thinking about your ad campaign strategy now. You might want to note down things like:
- How often will I run ads and on which social media channels?
- What types of ads do I want to run? (e.g. video, image, carousel, shopping ads, etc.)
- What targeting options will I use? (i.e. which users do I want to see my ads?)
- How will I measure ROI?
- What will my daily budget be?
Another paid strategy you might want to incorporate in your wider social media strategy is influencer marketing.
With influencer marketing, you work directly with popular creators in your niche on different platforms towards your social media goals.
You can use influencer marketing tools like ContentStudio to discover and analyze popular influencers to find ones that might be a good fit, and then grab their contact information.
When picking out influencers, you’ll want to think about things like how well their audience aligns with your target audience, the size of their following, their average engagement rate, whether their messaging & values align with your brand, etc.
You’ll also need to think about your budget. How much can you afford to spend on influencer campaigns? This will determine what kind of influencers you can work with.
For example, if you don’t have much to invest, you’re probably going to be limited to working with micro-influencers and nano-influencers with much smaller following sizes.
In some cases, you might be able to negotiate a contract where the influencer promotes your brand in exchange for a free product, rather than payment.
Step 11: Allocate tasks & set up a team workflow
The next step is to create your social media workflow.
This is the systematic process you and your team will follow to create, publish, and manage your social media content in the most optimal, efficient way possible. The goal is to work smarter, not harder.
Step number one in devising your workflow is to divide responsibilities amongst your team.
For example, you might have writers responsible for writing the post captions, designers responsible for making the visuals, strategists responsible for planning posts, community managers responsible for responding/replying to messages, etc.
A lot of social media management tools let you assign specific user roles to each of your team members, with specific access permissions, which will be useful.
Next, you’ll want to think about your approval processes. Do you want a manager to review every scheduled post to approve/reject it before it gets published?
Maybe you want to send posts to your legal team to make sure they’re compliant before scheduling them. Or if you’re a social media manager and you work with different brands, do you want your clients to approve the posts you create?
Again, most social media management tools, including SocialBee, will make it easy to set up these kinds of approval workflows.
The last thing to consider is automation. Are there any repetitive tasks that you can automate and systemize to improve efficiency?
For example, lots of social media inbox tools can automatically respond to common queries, or redirect specific comments/questions to different team members. Likewise, many social media publishing tools can automate parts of the content curation and scheduling process.
Step 12: Analyze performance & revise your strategy
At this point, you should already have a complete social media strategy.
However, no social media strategy is ever truly finished. There’s always room for improvement.
That’s why the final step is to periodically analyze your performance, and use the insights you gain to revise your strategy.
Use a social media analytics tool to dig into your data and track the KPIs you set in step one, then measure your progress towards them. Are you on the right track, or do you need to make a change?
Look back over your posts—which formats and topics are performing particularly well? Which ones aren’t? Use this to revise your content mix going forward.
Has your best time to post changed? If so, switch up your posting schedule. Are your paid ads generating a good ROI? If so, you might want to step it up and increase your budget. If not, consider reducing it.
You get the idea. I’d recommend reviewing your analytics and revising your strategy at least once a month.
Final thoughts
That concludes our guide to building a successful social media strategy.
Keep in mind that this is just a general guide to help you get started.
There’s no definitive social media strategy template that will work for everyone—everyone has their own approach—so feel free to tailor these steps to fit your brand’s unique needs.
And remember to experiment, analyze the results of your social media campaigns, and continuously refine your strategy and social media marketing goals to achieve the best possible outcomes.
Social media is ever-evolving, so stay flexible, keep learning, and most importantly—have fun with it!
Check out these social media automation tools to improve your efficiency on social media.
Planning to run giveaways as part of your strategy? These are the best social media contest apps for the job.
And if you plan to work with influencers, don’t miss these influencer marketing statistics.
Disclosure: If you buy through links on our site, we may make a commission.
