10 Essential Sections for a Successful Social Media Strategy

You might be here because you are a social media manager just starting out, or you are wondering how to market your business on social media. Before you create your content calendar and start posting to social media, it’s crucial to have a strategy in place–this provides each post with a purpose, and ensures that your social media presence is actually aligned with your business goals.

In this blog, we will unpack 10 of the essential sections you’ll need in your social media strategy. If you are eager to get started right away, we have a Social Media Strategy Template which provides you with all of the pages, sections and professional prompts you'll need!

01 / Target Audience Analysis

Understanding your audience is essential for meaningful interactions on social media. By researching and getting to know their preferences, you can create content that truly connects with them.

We like to split our target audience analysis into 3 categories:

Demographics	This involves defining your target audience’s age range, gender distribution, locations, and income range.
Psychographics	This involves looking into their values, approaches to decision-making, hobbies and interests, and attitudes in life.
Online Behaviours	This involves exploring how your target audience interacts with marketing channels, their purchasing habits, and how they consume information online.

02 / Industry Analysis

Your industry analysis should outline the specific trends that are taking place in your niche, therefore, whilst many social media trends may be applicable, they will also vary between industry sectors. Each trend should align with your brand and target audience to make the cut in your content strategy for social media.

An industry analysis also involves looking into your competitor’s social media activities. From this, you’ll be able to draw on how you can learn from competitors, but also how you can differentiate your social media presence from theirs.

It’s important to note that your social media strategy should be updated regularly (we recommend quarterly), this way you stay up-to-date with the latest trends, platform tools, and audience insights.

03 / Business Analysis & Audit

An internal analysis is also necessary–this is where we audit your business’s current social media position. Including:

• Metrics: Dive into your social media performance, including a Year on Year analysis to compare metrics over a time period.

• Audience Demographics: Provide an overview of the brand’s audience demographics–you can compare these insights with the desired target audience and evaluate alignment.

• Top Performing Posts: Identify the most successful posts so far and draw on what made these posts stand out–this way they can be integrated into the strategy moving forward.

• Top Performing Hashtags: Again, identifying the top performing hashtags means they can be incorporated into the strategy to maximise reach.

• SWOT Analysis: This involves exploring Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats; by doing so you can maximise opportunities and minimise the impact of threats.

04 / Social Media Goals

When setting social media goals your priority is to align them with overarching business objectives and marketing plan. Therefore, if you are a social media manager, it is important to understand your client’s needs–you might do this through consultation calls and questionnaires: View New Client Questionnaire Template →

Your social media goals should be SMART:

S	Specific	Goals should be clear, concise, and well-defined.
M	Measurable	Goals should include metrics to measure progress
A	Achievable	Goals should be challenging, but realistic.
R	Relevant	Goals should align with your main business objectives.
T	Time-Bound	Goals should have a specific time frame.

For each goal, you should define the strategies you will implement and the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) you’ll use to measure progress.

05 / Posting Plan

In your posting plan, you should define:

• Frequency of posts per week

• Platforms you will be using

• Formats to be used

• Which days and times you will post

In the strategy, we also like to provide an overview of how this will be broken down on a weekly basis (which will be expanded upon in the content calendar).

06 / Content Pillars

Content pillars refer to the key themes that your content is centred around–they provide a structure for content that ensures alignment with the brand. For each content pillar, you might have various sub-themes, and these will be split between posts on your feed vs stories.

Some examples of generic content pillars include: brand storytelling, customer reviews, memes, behind-the scenes, promotional content, tips and tutorials…the list goes on!

Each content pillar serves a different purpose, however, they should be strategically implemented–which involves drawing conclusions from your target audience analysis, industry insights, and social media audit.

07 / Engagement Strategy

Social media management not only involves strategising, creating content, posting, reporting; it is also important to actively engage with the social media community to build meaningful relationships.

Your engagement strategies are typically split into 2 categories:

Inbound Engagement	Outbound Engagement
This refers to responding to your audience, for instance, replying to comments on your own posts or DMs that are sent to your account.	This is when you are the one initiating interactions, for instance, commenting on others posts, following relevant accounts, and sending DMs.

In your social media strategy, you should define the actionable steps to carry out engagement, how often time should be allocated to these, and the KPIs to monitor engagement.

08 / Hashtags & SEO

Utilising the right hashtags and keywords boost your social media SEO as they categorise your content and help users find it. Hashtags might combine location relevance, niche-specific words, broader industry-related terms, and specific trends.

In our strategies, we like to outline hashtags and keywords based on each content pillar to ensure relevance to the post. By doing so, it also provides strategic guidance when it comes to writing caption copy.

09 / Platform Differentiation

Understanding the difference in platforms enables you to tailor your content strategy accordingly, meaning you can tap into distinct audience preferences and make room for effective engagement across various channels.

For each of the platforms you are using–which we earlier defined in the posting plan–you’ll want to outline the best practices for that platform, any relevant trends, and how the strategy should be adapted.

For instance, Instagram is a visual-centric platform while LinkedIn is better for sharing primarily written content, therefore, the content formats will differ between these.

10 / Social Media Style Guide

The purpose of a social media style guide is to ensure consistent brand presentation across all platforms–adhering to guidelines means that every post resonates with the brand’s visual style and messaging, which is key to building audience trust.

In our style guide, we define:

• Tone of Voice: The tone should reflect the brand’s personality and consider the emotions/messages that you would like to convey.

• Colour Palette: The use of colours should be consistent with existing branding and again, consider how they align with the emotions/messages that are being conveyed.

• Typography: Take into consideration whether typography is easy to read, consistent with existing fonts, and reflective of the tone/messaging.

• Image Guidelines: Imagery should reflect the brand’s values/messaging and adhere to the overall aesthetic to ensure consistency.

• Logos and Graphics: Consider when different logos and graphics should be used and what they represent.

• Standards: Define a list of clear DOs and DON’Ts–this might include considering emoji usage, response styles, number of hashtags, and more.

What next?

If you are in need of further guidance when it comes to completing your Social Media Strategy, check out our Template–perfect for freelance social media managers, social media agencies and business owners seeking to develop a comprehensive social media plan.

Social Media Strategy Template →

Once you have successfully completed your Social Media Strategy, the next step is to create a comprehensive Content Calendar. Remember to carry out regular social media reporting to evaluate and adapt your strategy.

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