Step 1: Take stock with a social media audit
Step 2: Define your social media goals
Step 3: Define your key performance indicators (KPIs)
Step 4: Identify your target audience
Step 5: Research your competitors
Step 6: Choose your social media platforms
Step 7: Build a social media content calendar
Step 9: Document your strategy
Step 10: Set up workflows to implement your strategy
Step 1: Take stock with a social media audit
If you’re starting your social media presence from scratch, skip to step two.
The very first thing you need to do is conduct a social media audit. This is an analysis of your existing social presence and can be a guiding point for your new strategy. Whether you’re creating a strategy for the first time or changing up an existing strategy, your team should start with an audit to get an understanding of what’s already in place, what’s working, and what needs to be improved.
Start by getting prepared. This means gathering your social media logins and access to any tools you use so that you can get a birds’ eye view of the content your brand has been publishing and how it has been performing. Create a spreadsheet to help you compile all relevant information as part of your audit, making it easier to analyze.
If you had previously set goals and KPIs, make a note of those so that you can analyze whether or not you’ve hit them. If not, you’ll want to analyze your general performance, then follow Step 2 and Step 3 where we set goals and KPIs in this guide. Then you can apply these to your audit retrospectively.
Then, you simply need to look through your social media analytics and input the data into your spreadsheet for analysis. Each major social media platform comes with its own built-in analytics, but you can also take advantage of a tool like Loomly to get all of your social media performance data within a single dashboard.
