How To Create A Social Media Strategy That Doesn’t Suck (For Once)

Want to learn how to create a social media marketing strategy that doesn’t suck? I’ve got you covered.

If you want to succeed on social, winging it isn’t an option. You need to do your research, plan ahead, and come up with a winning strategy to guide your efforts.

The problem is that even when brands do bother to make a social media marketing strategy, most of the time, they suck. It has to be more than just vibes and Canva posts.

In this post, I’ll share my step-by-step process for building a real social media strategy that gets results. But first, let’s go over the basics…

What is a social media marketing strategy?

Your social media strategy is your game plan for social media. 

It’s a comprehensive roadmap that tells you what your objectives are, what you’re going to do to achieve them, and how you’re going to measure progress.

With a strategy in place, you can create and engage with intention, rather than just throwing content out there and hoping something sticks. 

A good social media strategy will:

• Outline clear goals tied to business outcomes
• Tell you how you’re going to track your progress
• Explain who you’re trying to reach, and how you’re going to reach them
• Detail exactly what content you’re going to post, and when you’re going to post it
• Offer style guidance to ensure all your social messaging stays on-brand
• Explain how you’re going to engage with your audience and build a community
• Plan how you’ll use paid ads to complement your organic social media marketing efforts

Below, I’ll show you how to create a comprehensive strategy that includes all of the above.

But remember—the scope of your strategy is up to you. You don’t have to include everything we cover in this guide. Likewise, you might choose to add sections we haven’t covered.

Your strategy could be a detailed 30-page PDF (like this example from Colchester City Council) or a brief single-page document. 

There are no rules. The important thing is that it works for you.

How to build your social media strategy: Step by step

Alright, let’s get into it. Here’s how to create a social media strategy that doesn’t suck in 13 steps.

1. Start with an audit

Before you start planning where you want to get to, you need to know where you’re already at.

That’s why the first step in building a successful social media strategy is to conduct a comprehensive audit of your existing social media presence.

Review your social media profiles, look over your analytics, and ask yourself:

• What platforms am I currently active/inactive on? Which ones are driving the best results?
• What does my top-performing content look like? What kind of posts are getting the most views and engagements?
• What does my worst-performing content look like? What kind of posts are getting the least views and engagements?
• Who are my social media posts currently reaching? Does that align with my target audience?
• What kind of tone of voice am I using? Is my messaging consistent across social media channels?
• Are all my social media profiles complete, verified, and optimized? 
• What does my post creation and publishing workflow look like? Are there any obvious inefficiencies I could iron out to save time?

Take stock of all of the above and note down any glaring gaps in your social presence or areas for improvement. These insights will be important moving forward and will guide your strategy.

Tip: A good social media analytics tool like Social Status can help with this step. It can identify your best- and worst-performing posts, tell you what your audience demographics are, and provide tons of other useful insights.

[social status homepage]

2. Set realistic goals 

Now you know where you are, the next step is to plan where you want to get to, which means setting some social media marketing goals. 

Your social media goals should align with your broader business goals, and they should be SMART. That means they need to be:

• Specific. Know exactly what you want to achieve. ‘More followers’ isn’t specific—but ‘Increase my Instagram following by 1,000 engaged users’ is. 
• Measurable. A goal is pointless if you can’t track progress towards it. Make sure it’s measurable and decide what metrics and KPIs you’ll need to track it (e.g., engagement rate, follower growth, impressions/reach, etc.)
• Achievable. There’s nothing wrong with being ambitious, but don’t set yourself up to fail. Make sure your goals are realistically achievable—if your TikTok has 200 views total, don’t shoot for 1M by next Tuesday.
• Relevant. Make sure your social media goals actually support your broader business objectives. Otherwise, what’s the point?
• Time-bound. Deadlines keep you motivated and give you something to work towards. Set a timeframe so you know when to check in, adjust, or celebrate.

Let’s look at an example to put all that into context. Imagine one of your main business objectives this year is to achieve greater brand awareness in the marketplace. 

In that case, you might think a good social media goal would be ‘increase brand awareness on social media’—but that’s not SMART. 

A better example would be something like ‘Increase our social share of voice (SOV) from 10% to 20% by the end of the year’. That’s SMART—it’s specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.

Here’s another example. Let’s say your main business objective is to increase sales. A good place to start would be to drive more traffic to your online store through social media, right? 

So, one of your goals might be ‘Drive 10,000 landing page visits through Pinterest referrals this quarter’. See how that fits the SMART framework?

Keep in mind that the goals you set at this stage will inform the rest of your social media marketing plan, so take time to really think things through and make sure you get them right.

Tip: One more thing worth doing at this stage is to gather benchmarking data. Note down your current average engagement rate, follower count, posting frequency, or whatever KPIs/metrics are relevant to your goals for each platform you’re active on. This will give you something to refer back to later to measure improvement.

3. Know who you’re trying to reach

The next step is to research and define your target audience. 

You might think you know who your target audience is already—but do you really know them? 

You need to get scarily specific. We’re talking:

• Who they are (age, gender, location, job, salary, education, etc.)
• What they care about (goals, hobbies, interests, etc.)
• What they struggle with (pain points, challenges, etc.)
• Where they spend their time online (social media platform preferences, content preferences, influencers they follow, etc.)

The more deeply you know your target audience, the easier it will be to craft effective social media marketing content that reaches and engages them. 

So, how do you research your audience? Here are some options:

• Analyze comments and DMs. Look at the interactions you’ve had with your audience on social media to find out more about who they are, what they like, and what they dislike.
• Social listening. Use a tool like Brand24 to listen to what your audience is saying about your brand and competitors online.
• Surveys, polls, and interviews. Directly interact with your audience and ask for feedback to learn more about them.

4. Check out the competition

The next step is to do some competitive analysis to collect intel about what your rivals on social media are already doing.

What’s working for them? What’s flopping? And where’s your opportunity to not look like everyone else in your niche?

Start by identifying your biggest 3–5 direct competitors (or brands with a similar audience). Then, it’s time for some detective work.

You can look them up in a competitor research tool like Social Status to automatically extract useful insights, or go about it manually with a spreadsheet. 

Find out:

• The platforms they are active on
• How they sound (Voice, tone, messaging)
• Their best and worst performing posts
• The kind of content formats they use in their social media campaigns (Reels, carousels, curated content, etc.)
• How often they post, and when
• How they engage with their audience (Comments, replies, DMs)
• The influencers and brands they’re working with

These insights will come in handy when putting together your own strategy as they’ll give you an idea of what works, and help you to figure out how you can do it better than the competition.

5. Choose the right platforms

We’re done with the research stage and ready to start making plans. The next step is to decide which social media platforms you’re going to focus on. 

The key here is to be selective and not try to be everywhere at once. Unless you have a huge social media team at your disposal, that’s not going to work—you’ll spread yourself too thin.

Instead, focus on the platforms that are likely to drive the best results and avoid those where you’re just wasting time. They should align with your target audience, goals, and content strengths.

To help you narrow down your options, here’s a quick overview of some leading social media platforms and who/what they’re best for. 

Facebook

The largest social media platform in the world, with over 3 billion users, and still a powerhouse for community-building and local discovery.

Best for reaching older audiences (30+), running targeted ads, and hosting groups. Organic reach is limited, so you’ll need to invest in paid ads to get the most out of it, but it’s a solid platform for paid social media marketing campaigns and customer service.

Instagram

The go-to platform for visual storytelling. Great for lifestyle brands, eCommerce, influencers, and anyone with strong visuals. Top-performing content on Instagram includes short-form video (Reels), Stories, and carousels. Expect younger audiences, especially Millennials and Gen Z.

TikTok

All about short-form video and trends-based content. Ideal for brands targeting Gen Z and Gen Alpha, and for those looking to inject creativity and personality into their strategy. 

For best results on TikTok, prioritize entertainment and authenticity over polish. Virality potential is high if you nail the content. Its generous algorithm makes it much easier to reach a large audience organically, even as a new creator with a small following, compared to other networks, as long as you get the content right.

LinkedIn

The professional’s playground. Perfect for B2B brands, thought leadership, and recruitment. Long-form posts, industry insights, and company updates perform best. Well-suited to audiences in tech, finance, marketing, and other white-collar industries.

X (Twitter)

Still useful for real-time updates, hot takes, and engaging in conversations. Best for news, company updates, and customer support. Not as content-heavy as other social media marketing platforms, but good for building authority, providing customer service, and engaging in niche communities.

Also consider emerging Twitter alternatives: Bluesky, Threads, and Mastodon.

Pinterest

Underrated but powerful for evergreen content. Especially effective for lifestyle, home decor, fashion, DIY, and recipe-based brands. A top referral driver for blog traffic and sales. Works more like a visual search engine than a social feed. For best results, design eye-catching pins, use topic tags, and join group boards.

YouTube

The king of long-form video. Great for storytelling, how-tos, reviews, and educational content. YouTube Shorts opens up short-form potential too, and YouTube Live is great for building a community and deepening engagement with your subscribers.

6. Create a content plan

Now you’ve done your research and know what platforms you’re going to focus on, it’s time to start putting together a content plan.

Your content plan is the center of your social media strategy. It’s where you map out what you’re going to post.

A good way to start is to build out a few content categories. You can use a scheduling tool like SocialBee for this.

Content categories are like ‘buckets’ that you dump similar posts in. This allows you to group posts around shared themes, topics, or formats, ensuring a balanced content mix.

For instance, if you’re a fitness brand or influencer, you could create a bucket of posts around sharing nutritional tips. Another category could be based around workout tutorials. And another could be full of promotions of fitness equipment or affiliate offers. You get the idea.

When you’re putting together your categories, aim for a diverse mix of different types of posts. Think of these as content buckets.

Here’s a simple starting point:

• Educate – Teach your audience something useful
• Entertain – Make them laugh or smile
• Engage – Spark a conversation or reaction
• Promote – Show off your products/services

A good mix might be 50% value-driven (educate/entertain), 30% engagement-driven, and 20% promotional—but this can shift depending on your goals.

Don’t forget variety. Short-form videos, long-form videos, image posts, carousels, text posts, livestreams—test them all. 

And of course, always keep your target audience in mind. What are their pain points? What do they care about? What types of content do they enjoy? Let that shape your ideas.

You’ve planned what you’re going to post, now you need to plan when you’re going to post it.

Start by considering your posting frequency—how often will you post content to each social media platform?

You’ll need to factor in your bandwidth here. How much can you realistically manage? Don’t bite off more than you can chew. 

It also helps to look at what your competitors are doing. If they’re all posting 2-3 times a day on TikTok, you probably should be too.

It’s not just about how often you post, though—the time and day you post matters too.

Ideally, you should be posting content whenever your audience is most active and likely to engage. This’ll help ensure all your posts reach their full potential and get the maximum number of impressions and engagements.

A good social media scheduling tool like SocialBee can calculate your best time to post for you based on historical patterns. 

Once you know, build out a social media content calendar by setting up a weekly, category-based posting schedule. 

With SocialBee, you can queue up posts in the categories you created in the last step to be automatically published at a set date and time every week.

For instance, you might have SocialBee share a post from your ‘Promotional’ category on Instagram every Friday at 5 PM, and a funny video from your ‘Memes’ category every Tuesday at 1 PM. You get the idea. 

Alternatively, you can also schedule posts individually to any date and time in the calendar. 

Tip: Take advantage of batch upload and auto-recycling features to streamline your publishing workflows. For example, many social media schedulers let you automatically re-queue your evergreen content to share it again later at regular intervals. 

8. Create a style guide

Consistency is key on social media. 

You want your voice, visuals, and general vibe to be consistent across your whole social media presence, on every channel.

Build that into your strategy by including a social media style guide for your team to refer to.

At a minimum, your style guide should include guidance on:

• Social tone of voice (Funny, sarcastic, friendly, empathetic, inspirational, professional, etc.)
• Visual identity (Brand colours, logo usage, imagery style, etc)
• Post formatting (Emoji use, hashtags, line breaks, etc.)
• Language & grammar (Approved phrases, brand terminology, keywords, etc.)

You might want to add notes on how to work the social algorithms within your style guide, too. For instance, ‘Use bold hooks at the start of social media videos to increase viewer retention’ or ‘Use hashtags in Instagram captions to boost reach’.

You don’t need a 30-page PDF here. Just document the important stuff that’ll ensure your posts stay consistent and recognizable. This will be especially helpful if you’re outsourcing or working with a team.

9. Plan your engagement strategy

Your social media strategy isn’t just about the content you’ll post. You also need a game plan for engaging with your audience and nurturing an active community around your brand.

So, the next step is to think about how you’re going to show up in the comments and DMs.

Plan an engagement strategy that outlines how you’re going to talk to your audience. That includes:

• When & how often you’ll respond to comments and messages
• Brand tone and common responses
• What to do with negative comments or trolls
• Who you engage with outside your account (influencers, potential customers, brands)

A good social inbox tool like Pallyy’s can help you stay on top of everything. 

It pulls all your messages and comments from across social networks into one, easy-to-manage feed. Stay organized by assigning conversations to team members, and create automations to save time.

Tip: Be proactive with your engagement strategy. Don’t just reply when your followers engage with you, actively nurture engagement by asking questions in your posts, showing up in the comments of other viral posts in your niche, hosting live Q&As, and so on.

10. Consider collaboration

Collaboration is a big part of social media. Brands, creators, and influencers can often benefit from strategically teaming up to reach new audiences.

With that in mind, now’s the time to plan how partnerships and collaborations might fit into your wider social media strategy.

Think about:

• What types of collaborations are you interested in? (sponsored posts, influencer takeovers, co-created content, giveaways, etc.)
• What criteria will your partners need to meet? (audience fit, values alignment, engagement rate, follower count, niche relevance)
• What’s your budget for influencer marketing?
• How will you reach out to potential partners? (cold emails, DMs, media kit, influencer marketplaces, etc.)
• How will you track and manage your campaigns? (contracts, payments, deliverables, KPIs, UTM codes, etc.)

You might even want to make a list of potential partners at this stage and add it to your strategy to refer back to later. 

11. Map out your paid strategy

Organic reach on social media isn’t what it used to be. 

These days, a lot of platforms (Facebook, I’m looking at you) are pretty much pay-to-win—you’ll struggle to see good results if you don’t invest in ads.

That’s why the next step is to consider how paid social might play a part in your wider strategy.

When planning your social media strategy, consider:

• Budgeting. How much can you afford to spend on ads and boosted social posts per month?
• Targeting. What targeting options will you use to ensure your ads get seen by your target audience and deliver the best possible return on ad spend (ROAS)?
• Platforms. Which social media platforms will you run ads on? 
• Retargeting. Do you want to retarget social media users who have already engaged with your brand or visited your website?
• Goals. What are the goals of your ad campaigns? What kind of content/pages will you promote? What actions do you want your ad audience to complete?
• Optimization. How will you ensure your ads are optimized for maximum conversions? Hint: A/B testing can help.

If you’re going 100% organic and don’t plan to use social media ads at all, feel free to skip this step.

12. Plan for a crisis

Negative reviews and PR mishaps can spread like wildfire on social media, which is why it’s important to factor crisis management into your social media strategy.

You need a plan for what you’ll do when (not if) things go wrong to mitigate damage to your brand reputation.

Some things to consider here are:

• How you’ll identify an emerging crisis (a social listening tool like Brand24 can help with this)
• Who’s in charge of responding to complaints and negative comments on social media
• What kind of tone to use
• When to escalate internally
• How to pause or tweak scheduled content

13. Analyze, adapt, and optimize

Your social media strategy is never really complete.

It’s something you regularly review, tweak, and optimize based on results.

Use an analytics tool like Social Status to monitor your performance to figure out what’s working and what isn’t, and to track your progress towards your goals.

Then, take those insights and use them to optimize your strategy going forward. 

For instance, is it clear that certain content categories are getting more engagement than others? Prioritize those and drop any categories that aren’t working.

Noticed that your posts are getting more views in the evening than in the morning? Mix up your posting schedule to publish more content earlier and see if it helps.

Struggling to reach the goals you set in your social media strategy? It might be time to revise down and aim for something more realistic next month. 

You get the idea. Always look for areas where you can improve and refine your social media strategy over time, and eventually, you’ll end up with a winning formula.

Final thoughts

That concludes our complete guide on how to create a social media strategy that doens’t suck.

Remember that you don’t necessarily have to follow this guide to the letter—there’s no one-size-fits-all blueprint for a social media strategy. The best strategy is the one that works for you.

That said, the steps we’ve covered will give you a strong foundation to build from. Do your research. Set clear goals. Plan your content. Engage with your audience. And most importantly, stay flexible. Social media moves fast—your strategy needs to be able to move with it.

Good luck!

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