How to Create a Powerful Social Media Strategy in 2024

Is it possible to succeed without a strong social media strategy these days? Probably, but having one and implementing it successfully can speed up your success massively and ensure that your target audience finds you quicker.

To understand how exactly a social media marketing strategy works and why you need one, read further. This article will dive into all the basics of creating and launching your own strategy.

What you will find in this article:

What is a social media strategy?

Social media marketing is basically a digital marketing strategy that focuses on utilizing social media to promote your business, products, or services; connect with your target audience on a deeper level; and build trust. This strategy typically includes creating and sharing content on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, and others.

According to Statista, in July 2023, 4.88 billion people (59.9% of the world’s population) were actively using social media. If your business doesn’t have a social media presence, it is missing out on the chance to reach out to this massive audience.

Furthermore, merely having this presence still might not be enough to reach your goals, be it boosting sales or increasing brand recognition. This would be similar to traveling somewhere without a map or a route—you’ll probably get somewhere, but not necessarily to a place you wanted to.

A strong social media campaign strategy serves as this map or route, helping you achieve your digital marketing goals. It helps you build a consistent and organic presence, target your audience more effectively, figure out the results you want to achieve, and track your progress. And, of course, gain all the benefits of social media marketing.

How to create a social media strategy

Developing a social media strategy requires you to take the following steps:

1. Set clear objectives

2. Identify your target audience

3. Analyze competitors

4. Pick the right social media channels

5. Develop an engaging and consistent content strategy

6. Create a content calendar

7. Consider your budget and settings for targeted ads

8. Build relationships with your audience

9. Use data

10. Adjust your strategy whenever necessary

Let’s take a closer look at each stage of creating a powerful social media strategy.

How to start social media marketing

1. Set clear objectives

Before you start building a social media strategy for a small business, startup, or large brand, you have to clearly define what you want to achieve with its help, be it greater brand awareness, a better understanding of your target audience, generation of leads and followers, and other things. Even if you have several goals, you have to acknowledge each of them at this stage.

To increase your chances of achieving objectives, follow the SMART framework. It implies that your goals should be:

Specific. Specificity not only answers the question of what you want to achieve, but also who will be involved in the process, when and where they will work on it, and why this target is essential.
Measurable. Set KPIs for each goal, deciding which metrics you will use to track their progress. For instance, you can track interactions for Instagram and engagement for Facebook.
Attainable. At this stage, it is crucial to determine whether you have enough skills and resources to reach your goals.
Relevant. Consider whether these targets will be beneficial in the long run and how they align with your overall marketing goals.
Time-Bound. Now, you want to set a deadline for achieving your goals so that you can mark milestones and track progress.

When it comes to a social media marketing strategy, your SMART goal may be as follows: we want to gain 1K followers on Instagram within a month. To do this, our SMM manager will develop a dedicated content plan for social media, publish daily posts to engage our audience, and track performance using the platform’s metrics. Achieving this goal will help us improve brand awareness and reach and attract potential customers.

2. Identify your target audience

If your brand has already been on the market for a while, you probably already have a certain image of your audience in mind. Still, it’s important to ensure that this image is still relevant as time goes on.

The best way to achieve this is by running market research. You can collect valuable data with the help of:
customer interviews;

customer interviews;
user groups;
social listening;
online surveys;
buyer personas.

Creating buyer personas allows you to identify specific segments of your target audience. It is especially helpful if you offer a product or service to a wide range of consumers. Buyer personas help determine your target customers’ general demographics, personality characteristics, and needs.

To create accurate personas, consider the following details:

Demographics: age, gender, marital status
Location
Behavior: buying habits, goals, use of products and services
Interests and hobbies
Challenges: customer pain points
Communication preferences.

Dive deeper into this topic to create perfect buyer personas for better customer experiences.

As a result, you’ll get lots of valuable information about your customers. With it, you will be able to develop social media marketing techniques to refine your strategy and reach the right audience.

3. Analyze competitors

Competitor analysis is essential before launching your social media strategy and after it’s launched. It helps you understand how similar companies attract users and build relations with them.

To do this, identify your main competitors and check out their social media profiles. Pay attention to the topics they are covering and how different types of content is perceived by their audience. Then try to identify the social marketing strategies they use to drive engagement. This will help you understand what your audience likes better, gain insights (such as content topics you might want to cover too), and avoid potential plagiarism (even unintentional).

To go further, you can conduct a SWOT analysis to improve your social media marketing plan. It allows you to determine strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Strengths and weaknesses are internal factors, meaning they are what your brand has (or doesn’t have) compared to competitors, such as an innovative product, loyal customers, or professional staff. Opportunities and threats, in contrast, are external factors that occur outside of your company, for example, high competition or entering a new market.

Competitive analysis should not be a single event, but an ongoing process, as your social media marketing strategy requires flexibility and constant adaptation to current trends and updates. It can be done through social monitoring, which is especially useful for identifying potential opportunities and threats. To be aware of all the essential information about your industry, you can use social media competitor analysis tools such as Sprout Social or Hootsuite.

4. Pick the right social media channels

By this step, you should know which channels your audience visits frequently. Although it’s great to have a presence on all big social media, such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, you still need to invest your efforts wisely, paying attention to the platforms that can benefit you the most.

This is especially true for small businesses that might not have enough time, people, or the budget to tackle every social media. In this case, setting your priorities from the start can help you allocate your resources better. Furthermore, as each channel has its own preferences in terms of content types, this will give you more clarity at the next stage of the social media marketing process.

Let’s look at the key characteristics of the most popular social media platforms.

Facebook

Number of monthly users: 3.065 billion
Largest age group: 25–34 (31%)
Users by gender: 43.7% female, 56.3% male
Main content formats: text posts, photo posts, video posts, Facebook Live, Facebook Stories

YouTube

Number of monthly users: 2.491 billion
Largest age group: 25–34 (21.3%)
Users by gender: 45.6% female, 54.4% male
Main content formats: videos, YouTube Live, YouTube Shorts

Instagram

Number of monthly users: 2 billion
Largest age group: 18–24 (31.8%)
Users by gender: 49.4% female, 50.6% male
Main content formats: feed posts, Reels, Stories, Instagram videos, Live broadcasts

TikTok

Number of monthly users: 1.7 billion
Largest age group: 18–24 (36.2%)
Users by gender: 49.2% female, 50.8% male
Main content formats: videos, TikTok Live

X (formerly Twitter)

Number of monthly users: 335.7 million
Largest age group: 25–34 (38.5%)
Users by gender: 39.1% female, 60.9% male
Main content formats: text posts, images, videos

Choose the social media where your target audience is most active. Also, consider what types of content you can create. If it’s video, focus on YouTube or TikTok; if you plan to share images and text, try Instagram, X, or Facebook.

5. Develop an engaging and consistent content strategy

The next step in creating a social media strategy is content planning. Come up with the right tone of voice for your channels. It will define how your brand communicates with the audience, as well as how it is perceived. For instance, you can speak in a formal, expert tone of voice. Or, on the contrary, you can choose an informal, more friendly approach. Mind that despite the tone of voice having to be consistent across all channels, it can still differ slightly from one platform to another. Because after all, each platform also has its own personality.

Create a list of content types and themes you want to add to your strategy. This could be informative posts, entertaining videos, and other formats that your audience finds interesting and engaging.

To establish a content strategy that will effectively connect with your audience and offer them value, follow the 50-30-20 rule. According to it, 50% of your social media posts should engage, 30% inform, and 20% promote.

Engage. Consider what you can use to grab a viewer’s attention and evoke an emotional response. It can be a striking image of your product, an atmospheric video, or an intriguing story. Try to appeal to the different feelings and emotions of users, from curiosity and excitement to fun or even fear (like FOMO).
Inform. To understand what information your audience will find valuable, consider what questions your customers usually ask. You can deliver it in a user-friendly tutorial video or step-by-step guide. Share industry news, expert opinions, and practical tips to add meaning to your content.
Promote. Remember that the goal of a social media strategy is not to generate sales, but to help engage and build trusting relationships with your target audience. Therefore, try to use advertising sparingly and limit promotional posts to one for every five.

6. Create a content calendar

Once you know what types of content you want to create, you have to start thinking about how you will present it. Otherwise, you might end up releasing too many similar posts at once and generally spending more time on content preparation.

A content calendar is a great tool to ensure that your social media marketing plan is diverse, well-mixed, and posted with the right frequency. It allows you to create content in bunches and then schedule it for posting at the right time. It also helps you prepare content in advance for specific occasions like holidays.

First, decide how often you will publish posts. It can vary depending on the social media platform and type of content. For example, you should upload 3 to 5 posts per week on Instagram, but when it comes to stories, it’s advisable to share at least 2 per day. Next, decide on which days you will publish based on the 50-30-20 rule from the previous step. Mix and match engaging, informative, and promotional posts to maintain a balanced social media marketing content strategy.

Be sure to schedule posts for important holidays and events, especially if your product can be a gift. Also, combine evergreen and situational content. It will allow you to show that you are aware of trends. At the same time, you will be able to prepare some posts in advance, optimizing the content production process.

Keep in mind that your posts’ visibility strongly depends on well-thought-out scheduling. Maximize your reach by discovering the best times to publish on social media.

7. Consider a budget and settings for targeted ads

These days, it can be difficult to succeed on certain social media without targeted advertising. While TikTok is still a great source of organic traffic, older channels like Facebook or Instagram can turn organic growth into a challenge. Therefore, consider maximizing your chances of success with paid ads if you have the budget for them. Why are targeted ads good for an efficient social media marketing strategy? The answer is that social platforms collect user data such as age, location, and interests, allowing brands to use this information to reach their target audience.

At the same time, you need to set up your ads accordingly. Proper settings ensure that your budget will be spent wisely, helping you grow your audience.

First, you must learn how paid social media advertising is charged. For most ads, you pay a cost per thousand impressions (CPM) or cost per click (CPC). In the first case, you are charged whenever someone sees your ad—it’s a great way to boost brand awareness or reach a broad audience. With CPC, you only pay for clicks, which makes this option preferable if you need to get direct results like phone calls, leads, or orders.

The budget of each campaign can vary drastically depending on your objective, selected audience, launch time, activity period, and many other factors. But to have a general understanding, you can rely on the following data for the average CPM rates for top social media:

Meta (Facebook and Instagram)—$6.63
YouTube—$3.37
TikTok—$2.53
X—$1.73

Check out other insights related to running ads on the most popular social media platforms:

Facebook and Instagram

The most expensive month for ads is November, and the least costly is January.
The most expensive day of the week is Friday, and the least costly is Monday.

YouTube

The most expensive month for ads is February, and the least costly is April.
The most expensive day of the week is Friday, and the least costly is Wednesday.

TikTok

The most expensive month for ads is December, and the least costly is January.
The most expensive day of the week is Wednesday, and the least costly is Sunday.

The most expensive month for ads is September, and the least costly is August.
The most expensive day of the week is Wednesday, and the least costly is Monday.

8. Build relationships with your audience

Now that you’ve established contact with your audience, it’s your job to maintain and strengthen it. If you succeed, you’ll be able to build a strong and loyal community, as well as influence how your audience perceives your brand.

How do you achieve this? By being responsive to your audience: replying to comments, positively answering complaints, and generally showing your customers that you care. Another way to engage with your community is by asking them questions in your stories and launching surveys and polls. This way, you obtain feedback about your product or service, and your audience feels that you care about them.

You can effectively attract user attention and expand your potential audience by commenting on other accounts that might have a similar client demographic. Make it an integral part of your social media strategy by partnering with another brand or individual. Also, use the special features offered by different social platforms. For instance, you can create and participate in a Facebook group. The fact is that Facebook prioritizes the distribution of content from groups over page posts. In addition, the quality of potential group discussions will be much higher, as they usually bring together accounts with similar interests.

Another surefire way to build a connection with your audience is to share live videos, which usually resonate much more than recorded ones. They resemble real-life communication allowing users to comment and ask questions. Not surprisingly, this kind of interaction maximizes engagement. And don’t forget about the power of UGC. Involve your followers in creating your brand’s story, as they can communicate its personality and benefits much more efficiently and naturally.

9. Use data

Data allows you to track your progress and adjust social media marketing methods accordingly. Remember setting up metrics during the first step? Well, now it’s time to compare the results with your expectations.

Tracking parameters like the number of people who view your content, react to it, and follow the link to your website allows you to understand if your content works the way it should. If you feel like a content piece isn’t performing as well as you expected it to, check your metrics and think about the changes you can make.

To get valuable insights that can enhance the impact of your social media marketing plan, it’s important to analyze and visualize data. It will help you understand customer behavior, preferences, and sentiments that significantly influence the decision-making process. We suggest you try these data analysis techniques:

Sentiment analysis. This is the process of analyzing digital content to define the emotional tone of a message or post. The approach is especially useful when working with customer feedback and comments. Sentiment analysis automatically determines the author’s attitude toward the topic of the message. The gained insights can be used to both improve a product or service and to adapt your social media strategy.
Social network analysis. This type of analysis examines the relationships between social media users and identifies patterns of interaction. Why is it helpful? Companies get the opportunity to determine key influencers or advocates for their brands and build meaningful partnerships.
Content analysis. This involves analyzing social media content to identify promising topics or keywords. A content analysis gives brands an understanding of what topics are most attractive to their customers, and can provide inspiration for future content ideas and campaigns.

Discover the best data visualization tools and techniques to make your data easy to understand and use.

10. Adjust your strategy whenever necessary

By analyzing data obtained from the previous step, you will be able to determine the most effective social media platforms for your business (if you use multiple platforms), the most efficient types of content and ads, and the time when your audience is most active. Use these insights to make necessary adjustments to your social media strategy and enhance KPIs. And remember that this process of learning and improvement never ends.

Even if your social media branding and content strategy is well-planned, it isn’t set in stone and can be adjusted. Sometimes, your marketing goals change as time goes on, and you have to adapt your strategy accordingly. But even if your goals remain the same, there can still be some space to experiment. Social media is constantly evolving, so you need to be flexible in your strategy, test new content formats, and experiment with trends and tactics to ensure you’re ahead of the competition.

Use these practices to keep your social media marketing plan on track:

Stay on top of trends. Whether it’s popular aesthetics or visual trends, you need to be aware of the topics, styles, and concepts on everyone’s lips to offer relevant content that will resonate with your audience.
Monitor competitor content. We don’t mean copy your competitors’ content, but suggest a more strategic approach: analyze what formats and topics they use and what response they get from their audience. Pay attention to the most successful posts and consider how to integrate this experience into your communication.
Collaborate with influencers. Influencers can significantly increase your brand visibility and help build a desirable image. Research to find influencers who share your values and have followers from your target audience. We recommend focusing on micro-influencers, as their audiences are usually much more engaged and relevant.
Experiment. Social media is a very dynamic environment. What works well today may be useless tomorrow. Remember, your path to success comes from constant experimentation with content types, topics, and ways of interacting with your audience.

What are the most powerful social media marketing strategy examples?

If you want to further understand the impact of such strategies on small and big businesses, check out these amazing social media marketing strategy examples:

Oreo

Oreo’s team knows how to make the most out of their SMM marketing. Their content differs from one social media to another, demonstrating how the brand clearly understands its audience. Still, there’s one thing that’s present in every social media: Oreo’s famous humor.

One of the most vivid examples of this humor is the brand’s reaction to the 2013 Super Bowl blackout. Back then, Oreo tweeted an ad saying “You can still dunk in the dark”, which immediately went viral.

Sourse: davidmeermanscott.com

If you have a skilled content writer in your digital marketing team, you can follow Oreo’s example and impress your audience with witty, up-to-date humor.

Airbnb

Airbnb is another successful social media strategy example. The platform allows people worldwide to list their apartments for rent, so travelers can stay there short-term and long-term.

To ensure that the experience shared on social media truly reflects customer experiences, the brand encourages everyone to post pictures of their stay in Airbnb apartments. This instantly creates a lot of relevant and up-to-date content. Users, on the other hand, have a chance to get featured.

Such an approach can be successfully used by any brand with products or services that are easy to take pictures of.

Amazon

Last but not least, a prominent example of a social media advertising strategy is Amazon. Even though it was named the biggest online retailer in the US last year, Amazon doesn’t miss an opportunity to strengthen its online presence with the help of the right SMM strategy.

To achieve this, they find user-generated content that is more than just mentions and use it for their social media. Here’s an example of this:

Social media strategy example

Sourse: Amazon

How to integrate social media into your marketing strategy

Research your audience. At this stage, you figure out who your audience is, what platforms they prefer, and how they differ between various platforms.
Make use of your data. Decide which tone of voice you will pick to communicate with your audience, what messages you plan to deliver, and what impression you want to create — a friendly one, an expert one, etc.
Evaluate your goals. What do you want to achieve with the help of your strategy, how do you plan on achieving it, and what are the KPIs that you will set to track progress?
Create a content schedule based on all the above.

Understanding the trends of social media marketing in 2024

User-generated content (UGC)

UGC has been on social media for a while already, but has become even more popular in the last couple of years. Brands love it because it helps them create a sense of community, build authenticity, and drive more engagement. Users, on the other hand, enjoy being tagged by their favorite brands and praised for the quality of their content.

Micro and nano influencers

In the past few years, many companies started switching from big names and well-known bloggers to micro and nano influencers. Although these influencers have fewer followers, their community is generally loyal, well-engaged, and more eager to trust their recommendations. Collaboration with such influencers also allows brands to reach out to more relevant audiences and niche markets.

Long and short videos

With TikTok and Instagram Reels still thriving, video content has become an inseparable and significant part of social media marketing strategies. In 2023, 91% of businesses use videos as a marketing tool, and 70% of marketers who don’t use videos yet plan to start doing so soon. The good news is that you don’t have to start with something big and polished — even short-form entertaining video content performs well if it’s relevant to your target audience.

Purpose-driven marketing

Users have started to demand more from the brands they follow. Simply offering high-quality goods or services supported by catchy content might not be enough to build a strong and loyal community. You have to think about how to unite this community on a deeper level, and how your brand’s values align with their beliefs. World famous companies such as Uber, Dove, and Lush have launched purpose-driven marketing campaigns since, addressing various important issues—from unrealistic beauty standards to responsible drinking. You can learn from them and try doing something similar on behalf of your brand.

Wrapping up

A strong, well-developed social media strategy can help you foster a strong connection with your audience, make the most out of your online presence, and create a loyal community around your brand. To achieve such results, it’s important to study successful SMM strategy cases, keep an eye on trends, and use social media marketing strategy templates to help track your goals.

FAQs

What are the essential elements of a social media marketing strategy?

In order to craft a successful social media strategy, you need to define your goals and understand your audience. It will help you choose the right platforms for efficient communication. Another vital component of social media marketing strategies is a well-thought-out content plan that will meet the interests and expectations of your audience, ensuring high engagement.

How does social media affect marketing strategy?

Social media offers you a direct and cost-effective way to reach and engage with a broad audience. You can interact with target users in real-time, get data-driven insights, and tailor content to specific demographics.

What is the key to making a social media marketing strategy a success?

The key to a successful social media marketing strategy is consistency. Maintaining a regular posting schedule, engaging with your audience, and adapting your strategy based on data and feedback are crucial to building brand trust and achieving your marketing goals.