How to Improve Your Social Media Strategy

Businesses are getting better about not missing out on the marketing potential of social media. But getting social media marketing right can still be a challenge, whether you have 5 employees or 5,000. 

When everyone from your grandmother to your dog has a Facebook profile and an Instagram handle, it can be tough to figure out how your business fits into the social media ecosystem.

If you’re just getting started with your social media strategy or aren’t sure if you’re heading in the right direction, read through our tips below to stay on the right track. 

1. Choose your networks wisely: It rarely makes sense for a business to have a profile on every social media platform. Each platform has its strengths and weaknesses. If you’re a B2C brand with picture perfect merchandise, Instagram should be your top priority. For B2B companies, LinkedIn and YouTube probably make more sense. It all depends on your ideal customer. Where are they spending their time on social media? Focus your efforts on only a couple of platforms, maximum. 
2. Commit to a posting schedule: You don’t have to post every hour, on the hour, but you should have a content calendar that guides your posting schedule. Platforms like Twitter thrive on constant tweets, but Facebook and LinkedIn benefit from more thoughtful, deeper content a handful of times a week. Plan a monthly content calendar around the kind of content you will be working with. Spread it out throughout the week and across the month. It’s okay to reuse well-performing content. 
3. Mix original content with reposts and shared posts: Not everything you post needs to be created by you! Providing commentary or a counterpoint to another article or blog post is an easy way to share content while showcasing something you can speak authoritatively on. Just make sure anything you repost is attributed and linked to—we're not advocating for stealing people’s content. 
4. Video content is king: If you’re looking for engagement (and who isn’t on social media?), video content has the highest engagement rate, much higher than photos and way higher than text only posts. If you have the means to build your own video content, create away! If not, sharing videos is another great way to take part until you have the means to outsource or create video content in-house. 
5. Stick to your niche: Just because everyone else is talking about the Tide Pod challenge or the latest Kardashian drama, that doesn’t mean it makes sense for your brand to chime in. It all depends on the tone of your brand, your customer pool, and your overall strategy. If you’re a laundry mat, for example, with a rather congenial vibe on your Twitter account, maybe it does make sense to talk about Tide Pods! But for an IT company or a landscaping group, not so much.
6. Match your tone to your branding: Just like focusing on your niche, staying on brand with your tone will keep you consistent. Taco Bell and Burger King are great at being silly on Twitter. For the younger consumers they are targeting, it makes sense for them to be colloquial and speak like a millennial or Gen Z. For a funeral home or a tax-prep service, that may not work well with their potential customers. 
7. Hashtag strategically: Getting your content in front of the right people is where hashtags can come in handy. Users can follow hashtags on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, you name it! If you use a hashtag in a post, other people can discover it when they follow or search for that hashtag. The key is to only use hashtags that make sense, and not go overboard. Twitter and Instagram posts can have dozens of hashtags (not that we advocate for that) while Facebook and LinkedIn posts usually only have a few. To hashtag effectively, do some research to see what hashtags your competitors are using, the ones that your customers are following, and the volume those hashtags generate. Just like with SEO, the goal is to stand out in queries that your customers are making, not just being seen by anyone with an account. 

These seven tips will help you formulate and improve a basic social media strategy. Your strategy’s outcome with depend on the amount of time you spend curating and creating content. Consistency is key: stick to your posting schedule and engage with followers and commenters. The whole point of having a social media strategy is to interact with customers and potential clients, so have fun with it! And if you get stuck, call in the experts!