Social Media Strategy in 8 Steps
An eight-step sequence for building a social media strategy from scratch: set the objective, know the audience, and pick the platform, before getting into content, schedule, and measurement.
Objective and audience open the row of eight boxes, with content and measurement only appearing once those are set.
Reach for this when…
- You're starting a social media presence from zero and don't know where to begin.
- Content is being produced before anyone has agreed what it's for.
- You keep adding platforms without a reason to be on each one.
How to run it
- Define your social media objectives.
- Identify your target audience.
- Select the platforms that audience actually uses.
- Create content built around the objective, not the platform trend of the week.
- Establish and hold a consistent posting schedule.
- Monitor performance metrics against the original objective.
- Analyse the results against what you set out to achieve.
- Adjust the strategy based on what the results show.
A worked example
Situation. Ryan Cole runs Lonestar Analytics, a small SaaS company in Austin, United States, whose social presence was scattered across five platforms with no consistent posting and no stated goal.
Applied. He worked through the eight steps in order, cutting the platform list to the one where his B2B buyers actually spent time, and refused to let anyone write content until step one, the objective, was agreed in writing.
Result. Posting on one platform with a clear lead-generation objective produced more qualified demo requests in a quarter than a year of scattered posting on five.
The catch
The eight steps are sound but sequential, and teams under pressure skip straight to content because it feels like progress. The sequence also says little about paid promotion, which increasingly decides what anyone actually sees regardless of organic strategy. And a 'consistent posting schedule' can become a treadmill that produces volume without quality once the original objective is forgotten.
If step one, the objective, isn't written down, every later step is just guessing.