I say this time and time again: a social media strategy is not a strategy at all if it hasn’t been refreshed within the past three months (or when your brand or a social media platform has made a major strategic shift). Think about how fast things change on social media. When the platforms change, your audience’s needs and habits change too. So, to get the most return on your social media investment, make sure that you’re not continuing to follow an outdated strategy that doesn't meet your brand or audience needs. It’s incredibly expensive and wasteful to spend money on your team (agency or internal) to continue to execute a plan that is outdated or simply doesn’t work anymore.
Before we get started, I’d like to raise one important point. This post assumes that you have a social media strategy in place. There is a lot that goes into creating social media strategies, and they must be crafted carefully. Things like programming, engagement tactics, hashtag use, goals, brand personas, and tone are just some of the things that can be included in a social media strategy. If you’re starting from scratch, don’t worry. We will be sharing how to craft an effective social media strategy in the coming months to help you along this path, and we also offer this as a service, if you’d like us to do it for you.
I always suggest revisiting your strategies every quarter to start and then revamping them in a more significant way annually. If you’re implementing something older than three months, you need to refresh your social media strategies pronto. This post will help!
STEP 1: Conduct a Social Media Audit
Audit the social media channels where your brand has a presence. An audit can help you rank your channels based on performance, strategic fit, and audience overlap. It will also reveal which types of posts perform best for your unique audience and inform your goal-setting.
Here are some good resources to help you conduct a social media audit yourself.
• How to Perform a Social Media Audit
• The 30 Minute Social Media Audit
• Complete a Social Media Audit in Nine Steps
My team also regularly conducts audits as part of our strategy development work and will be happy to help you. Find out about our services here.
During your audit is a good time to look not just at your social media strategy but also your brand’s overall social media mix. Take time annually to reflect and see what channels make the most sense strategically for your brand. Not every social media channel is right for every brand. Too many brands commit to creating a presence in certain social media channels haphazardly. Many jump on because “everyone is on there” or “a board member told them to” or “the social media manager at the time just liked the platform.” All of these reasons should be hitting you over the head with red flags. No, no, no! When considering what social media channels to be on, remember that you don’t need to be on every social media channel. Use the audit to inform your decisions. Wherever you choose to be in the space, you do need to commit to delivering consistent and high-quality content (along with fostering an engaged community) on the channels that you are on. Remember that social media is a commitment and never just a campaign.
STEP 2: Update your Programming Plan and Cadence
Your audit will bring your programming plan to light. What types of posts do you tend to share most often? What are the results? When we conduct audits, we rarely find brands that are using all of the posts types available on each channel. It’s important that you have a diversified approach to what types of posts you program, as your audience is also diverse, and what one person likes to engage with is not the same as for others. Plus, you don’t want to be a one-trick pony, posting the same types of posts over and over again. I’m getting bored just thinking about it.
Beyond post type, your audit will also reveal the content you share and its effectiveness. You’ll uncover whether you tend to just talk about your product or service or that you have a more balanced approach where you talk about topics that are important to your brand and audience. Just like post type, you want to make sure that this is also a diversified approach AND that what you program maps to your specific goals. For example, if your main goal is to generate referral traffic and you are primarily curating external resources and creating engagement posts like videos and images, your programming strategy isn’t aligned with your goals.
Your audit will also reveal your current cadence for each channel. It’s important to think about how often you’d like to (and can) post. To start, you’ll want to consider best practices around how often to post and when. Before settling on a cadence, we encourage brands to value quality and consistency over quantity. Using the data you’ve been tracking as a guide, eliminate what’s not working, and build your programming plan on things that are. Change scheduling times to take advantage of peak engagement/reach times.
STEP 3: Adjust your Goals and Expectations
Take a look at your goals and your progress toward them. I recommend monitoring your stats weekly and doing a deeper dive monthly. When my team tracks performance, we always have a column that lists our goals and another column that calculates our progress towards goals. If you are not pacing appropriately towards your goals, you may want to change them or adjust your strategy. Always look at your goals with the following questions in mind:
• Are they still appropriate?
• What assumptions did I make forming these goals?
• Has anything changed significantly since forming these goals?
• Are they focused on what really matters?
• What can I do to pace towards these goals? (This is where you refresh your strategy.)
We like to create goals that are attainable but also would slightly stretch you to achieve them. How do you do that? Well, it depends on the strategy you select. For example, if you’ve decided to double your capacity or investment with social media, you may want to form goals by estimating what else you can achieve with these added resources. Another strategy is to back out of your goals (say 5,000 Twitter followers) and then allocating the right amount of time to do so. Aim to be realistic, as you can’t grow your social media presence overnight. Another slightly more conservative approach is to use your current growth rates and add an increase to that, maybe 20% to start. As you continue to monitor your goals, you’ll begin to see what’s realistic and what’s not. Your goals should directly dictate your programming strategy and drive what you post.
So, there you have it, three key steps for refreshing your social media strategy. Conducting an audit is an important first step that will allow you to revisit your overall social marketing mix, then update your social media channel strategies.