We strongly believe that is doesn’t matter how small your business is, if you’re serious about making it a success and you use social media you NEED to have a strategy.

Having a clear written social media strategy will save you time, help you to post consistently, improve the quality of your social media posts and more importantly help you to reach your business goals quicker.

But what should you include in your social media strategy?

Here are the eight elements we feel are essential.

1. SMART Social Media Goals

Goals are important, without them how do you know what you’re trying to achieve on social media.

Goals will help you focus on the content you need to create and give you a purpose.

Plus the best way to achieve any goal is to write it down and share it with someone. This will significantly increase your chances of achieving that goal.

2. Detailed User Personas

It’s important to really understand your target audience and who you are trying to reach on social media.

Also thinking about the problems they face that you can help them solve will make creating content so much easier too.

3. Mission Statements

You don’t need to be using every single social media platform. Focus your efforts on the ones that are most relevant to your audience and the goals you want to achieve.

Then set yourself a mission for each of your chosen platforms.

4. Brand Personality & Tone of Voice

It’s important to have a consistent brand personality and tone of voice for your business on social media.

Being clear on this and including it in your strategy will help you to stay on brand.

5. Competitor Analysis

Every business has competitors, some healthy competition isn’t a bad thing!

It’s important to keep an eye on what they’re doing so you can learn from their mistakes, differentiate your business and be inspired.

6. Social Media Content Pillars

Content pillars are a group of topics or themes that are relevant for your target audience, which your business will share content around.

Having clear content pillars will make coming up with social media content ideas so much easier.

7. A Social Media Content Strategy

Consistency is key on social media so pick a posting schedule that will work for you and stick with it.

You also want to share a variety of different content and come up with campaign ideas that will get your followers engaged.

8. Measure Your Success

And finally, it’s essential to measure your success so you know all the time and effort your putting into social media is making a difference!

Also remember a good social media strategy is never set in stone, it’s a work in progress.

Join the Social Media Strategy Programme and we’ll share a 21 page workbook with all the tools and templates you need to create a social media strategy for your small business.

We’ll also take you through all the elements in 4 live training sessions, give you feedback on the strategy you create as well as work with you 1:1 to make sure it’s as strategic as possible!

You can find out more about the next Social Media Strategy Programme here.