Small Business Owners Guide to Creating a Social Media Strategy

When it comes to business, social media is more than a place to share selfies and what you ate for breakfast. It is a place to reach a broad audience, attract ideal customers and establish what your business stands for. 

You may have heard Social Media Managers, like myself, talk about creating a social media strategy. Why is this important? Just as in traditional marketing methods, having a focus or goal is integral. Otherwise, you’re quite literally throwing spaghetti at a wall and hoping it will stick. Whereas, if you have a goal and a means of tracking whether or not your strategy is helping you to reach that goal, then you can start making some real progress. You can make informed decisions about your business, so you can better serve your customers or clients.

Read below for how to create a successful social media strategy for your business.   

Step 1: Review Previous Performance

While many make the mistake of diving straight into content creation without a plan, a great social media strategy begins with a lot of analysis and planning. I recommend looking through your last 90 days on each platform you are planning to post on. What should you be looking for? 

• Patterns: What type of posts does your audience engage with most? What posts helped you to reach more non-followers? Do you notice any differences between platforms in performance?

• Keywords: Did you use similar keywords in multiple posts? Is there a difference between any of those posts in performance? 

• Aesthetics: Are there certain colors or maybe fonts your audience is drawn to? Is there certain imagery your audience enjoys?

• Comments & DMs: What are your followers saying? Do you notice any frequently asked questions?

Step 2: Define Your Goals

Now, it’s time to define your goals. These should line up with your goals as a business, both sales-wise and values-wise. Below are some examples.

You’re a new business, and you want to get in front of the eyes of new potential customers. For social media, this means you want to increase brand awareness, and you will want to focus on metrics such as impressions, reach and shares.

You’re a service based business, and you want to derive connections with new potential clients. This one isn’t so straightforward, but social media is a great place to do this. What I can tell you is you will want to focus on metrics like comments, direct messages and website traffic from social media. 

You’re a business owner who wants to educate your audience about a topic you are passionate about. In other words, you want to prove you’re an expert in the topic and encourage others to want to be passionate about the topic as well. The metrics you will want to pay attention to will be saves, direct messages and follower growth. 

Step 3: Study Your Audience

Your audience determines the value and relevance of your content, not you. So, it’s important to understand them; you want to get to know their likes and dislikes, their lifestyle and their routines (especially when it comes to social media use).

How do you study your audience? Follow some of them back, if you haven’t, and look at what they post. What are they interested in? What are their hobbies? What are their usual weekend activities? Get to know them through their digital presence, but also give your Insights a look. This will give you an idea of where your audience lives, how old they are, etc. 

Another great way to study your audience is to ask for their feedback. Use the Poll sticker on your stories, or ask them to comment their thoughts on a particular post.   

Step 4: Identify Key Platforms, Ideal Posting Frequency & Major Performance Indicators

You’ve studied your past performance, defined your major goals and thought in-depth about your audience so far. Here, it’s time to make some informed decisions.

Let’s begin with how to decide on which social media platforms you want to post on. Return to Step 3, and take a look at the average ages of your audience. Social media users are generally broken up by age. 

Facebook = Boomers/Gen X, Instagram = Gen X/Millennials and TikTok = Gen Z. Forget about Threads and X (formerly Twitter), because everyone prioritizes visual content nowadays. YouTube isn’t actually a social media platform (it’s a search engine), but it is pretty all over the board in terms of users. There are other platforms, but these are the ones that currently matter in my opinion. I also want to note again that these are very general divisions. There is absolutely crossover, but in terms of majority these are pretty on point. 

When it comes to ideal posting frequency, try and keep in mind what you can realistically keep up with. More is not always better when it comes to social media either; a lot of times the quality of the content matters more than the quantity. In general, I recommend my clients post somewhere between 3-5 times on their feeds each week. Stories, in my opinion, should be posted almost every day. 

Last but not least, how do you determine your major performance indicators? Go back to the examples I listed in Step 2. The “metrics” to pay attention to that I mention are your performance indicators.    

Step 5: Optimize Profile & Content to Align with Your Strategy

You’re almost done! Giving your profiles and content a little refresh in order to align with your new social media strategy is the final step in this process.

Can you reframe your Instagram bio to align with your strategy but still stay on brand? Is there a way to change up your style for TikTok to align with your strategy, without confusing or annoying your current audience? Ask yourself these questions, and make changes where it makes sense.