Organic Social Media Strategy

Approach

I never understood why some people “hate” social media. It’s a super fun, super rewarding, fast-evolving medium to connect with audiences and humanize a brand.

Like all endeavors, I always start by creating a social media strategy brief. After defining the goals, audience, and tone of voice, the strategy outlines a content plan per platform. This defines how each social media platform will be used, the posting cadence, the types of posts that will resonate, and sources of content inspiration.

The strategy doc is a result of competitive and industry research — how often are direct competitors posting, what kind of content are they posting, how much engagement do they get per post, how large is their following, what hashtags are they using, what are the opportunities and weaknesses I’m seeing — this is the critical lens through which I analyze the competitive landscape.

If there is existing documentation on brand voice, brand personality, user personas, editorial/content style guide etc., the social media strategy is a good place to aggregate these resources and ensure they are being properly leveraged. It’s important to expand upon these as well — e.g. if the brand personality is “witty” and “carefree”, it would be a natural fit for the social media strategy to include emojis or memes.

If there is no existing brand documentation, the social media strategy becomes the perfect opportunity to start defining these facets.