How to Create a Successful Social Media Publishing Strategy
How you manage your social media marketing strategy can make or break your online presence. Get it right, and you can present your brand as a major thought leader in your industry and prove your impact by bringing in incredible ROI from social. Get it wrong, and you could face an ongoing struggle to get your social media off the ground.
The reality is, the potential is always there–it just needs to be unlocked. Getting successful on social media isn’t about getting lucky. Much to the contrary, it’s about overcoming the unpredictable parts of social media to create a stellar social media publishing strategy.
So, how do you get there? From creating knock-out content to centralizing everything in the right social media publishing platform, here’s what you need to know.
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- Master Content Creation
- Use Social Listening to Improve Content Creation
- Commit to Consistency
- Engage, then Re-Engage
- Keep Your Strategy Flexible
Master Content Creation
Content is fundamental to your social media strategy. It’s as fundamental as the channel itself. It’s what will engage your audience, provide insight into how your services can help, educate them on trends in your industry, and ultimately, lead to those invaluable conversions
So, what does a good content creation process look like?
1. Batched
There are tons of benefits to working in batches and avoiding ‘creating on demand’ on the day of publishing. This content creation process involves writing effective compelling content in batches in advance.
This way, you can avoid falling behind your timetable, ensuring the creation and approval processes stay on a smooth course, and that you’re always ready with the right piece of content when a trend pops up on social media.
2. Collaborative
Encouraging collaboration has a lot of benefits for your social media strategy. Your employees have acute insight into your industry’s trending topics from various perspectives. For example, your revenue teams spend time speaking to prospects and learning about their pain points, and what solutions work for them. By collaborating with them, you can build out an effective strategy and create relevant content that converts.
This is also where the benefits of collaborative content creation begin to overlap with the benefits of employee advocacy, and encouraging your workforce to share their expertise to attract a wider audience on social.
3. Proactive
Leveraging social media requires a certain amount of responsiveness. When trends rise, you need to be agile enough to spot them while they’re gaining momentum and create content around them while they’re still relevant.
Social listening can help you identify the latest trends in your industry and bring relevant conversations to your attention in real time.
4. Thrifty
How much have you (or your team) created, posted, stored, and repurposed content?
Content repurposing isn’t the same as reposting or duplication. It’s a separate practice – one that works by taking strong content and turning it into something new.
Let’s say you gave a presentation at a big industry event. Can you turn your speech into a series of thought-provoking social media engagement posts? Probably, and without much time or effort. What about all those slides? Can they be condensed down into an attention-grabbing infographic or Instagram carousel? We bet they could.
If you can master all those elements of content creation – and inform your creativity with actionable social insights – then your social publishing strategy can take off without consuming your marketing team’s manpower.
Use Social Listening to Improve Content Creation
If you can get good at social listening, you can create the exact type of content your audience wants to see.
Unlike social monitoring, which is a reactive practice focused on spotting direct mentions of your brand, social listening has you dropping in on trends and conversations between your customers or prospects that directly or indirectly relate to your products/services and your industry.
But why do it? Because it’s the best way to understand your target audience – what engages them, what they want to talk about, what issues they’re experiencing that you can help with, and what they’re not currently getting from one of your competitors. This information can inspire the content your team creates and publishes, ensuring it’s in line with customer needs.
Commit to Consistency
Regular and consistent social posting builds trust and engagement. It signals to your audience that you are invested in posting quality content to your channels, and enables you to reach your goal of establishing thought leadership.
Put simply, brands that post spontaneously – a few posts here and there, followed by periods of their channels falling silent – are underutilizing their social media presence. We know the potential ROI that your social channels hold, and there’s no way of unlocking it without a clear schedule for consistent social posting. Without it, you will drive a wedge between your brand and your followers.
With the right social media management platform, you can approve and schedule your social content long in advance, providing the whole team with insight into upcoming posts. Scheduling content makes it easier for your team to identify any gaps ahead of time, signaling the need for content creation or repurposing before you’re running up against a deadline.
Engage, then Re-Engage
Engaging followers is one of the key benefits and results of a strong social media publishing strategy. Each post you make will yield a long list of insights – metrics that demonstrate how effective that post was at engaging, garnering interactions, and converting audience members into customers.
But the investment of time and energy into your social channels shouldn’t grind to a halt between social posts. After that post has been made, it’s important to monitor responses and reactions, finding opportunities to join in conversations in comment sections and interact directly with your followers.
This is, of course, an incredibly time-consuming endeavor – or it can be, unless you make use of the right tools for streamlining community management.
A tool with a centralized space for interacting with followers across your social channels will help you keep on top of conversations without having to move back and forth between social media accounts. It takes the legwork out of community management, allowing it to become a core part of your social media publishing strategy without representing a major drain on time and resources.
Keep Your Strategy Flexible
The best strategies plan ahead, but as all social media managers know, social plans aren’t always set in stone. Each social network is its own unique ecosystem, but one thing that unites all those channels is the fact that things can (and will) change. Trend cycles are getting faster and faster with each new year, and audiences are ever fickler when it comes to what interests them, and what they simply scroll past.
The most successful branded social media accounts are those that can respond to the ebb and flow of trends as they occur. It’s no good to identify a key conversation taking place amongst your target audience on social media, create relevant content, and add it to your publishing schedule to go live six weeks from now. When those topics crop up, you’ve got to be willing (and able) to respond to them there and then.
Drive Impact With Your Social Strategy
Regular and quality publishing on social media is the key to capturing your audience’s attention and getting an edge on your competition. The more you post, the more insights your channels will generate, and the more you will come to understand your audience – and the tangible ROI your efforts are generating on social media.
To learn more about creating a successful social strategy and employee advocacy program to drive brand awareness and boost your lead generation efforts, contact us today.
