We have been implementing a social strategy for Blue Thirst over the last few months. This has been across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn. As a digital marketing agency, we believe that having an organic presence and a social strategy provides credibility for your brand so we wanted our presence to be more consistent.

Here are the top 5 things we learnt through this process:

1. It’s Important to Have a Well-Rounded Social Presence

When planning your social strategy, you need to ensure that your activity is going to be consistent and includes a range of different content types initially. By doing this you can gather data about what is successful for your audience, it can also indicate the best times to post.  This can then tailor your future social strategy to produce the best performance.

2. Organic Social Media Performance is a Slow Burner

Organic performance can take awhile to show real results even with a social strategy. If you aren’t consistent and engaging, you won’t see an improvement in your organic engagement and popularity. Some platforms, such as Facebook, are particularly difficult to get organic traction on. So, make sure you’re putting the most effort into the platforms which are most important to your brand when planning your social strategy.  

3. Making Your Posts Engaging is Essential

If you don’t give people a reason to engage with your content, then they’ll probably just scroll past. It’s easy to get likes on your content if it fits with your brand and the platform, however getting comments and shares requires highly engaging content. Make sure you’re asking your audience questions or giving them something of value that they would feel the need to share when planning your social strategy.

4.  Tracking the Performance of Different Post Types Can Inform Your Strategy

When you start you should be posting a wide variety of content types so that you can determine what works best for your audience. After a few weeks you’ll be able to see from your performance data what types of content work best for you. For some people it’s images and for others it could be video. Find out what produces the best results for your brand.

5. If You Don’t Know What Your Audience Like, Your Posts Won’t Be Successful

As mentioned above it’s important that you look at which content types are most successful for you. If you keep posting things which don’t resonate with your audience then it could have a negative impact on your engagement.

Overall, your business should have a social strategy and initially it will be a bit of trial and error. You need to be aiming to provide value for your audience and always keep them in mind when refreshing your strategy. Sprout Social have a great resource for creating a 30-day social media plan: https://sproutsocial.com/insights/guides/social-media-plan/