Are you reaching the right prospects? Are you spreading the news about your business? If so, congratulations! You have a well-functioning social media marketing strategy. If the answer is negative, chances are that you haven’t mastered the science of social media content creation yet.

Building a social media content strategy is the key to reaching the right people and making the most of your online presence. The task may seem intimidating at first but if you learn from the experience of the pros in the field, you’ll soon get good results.

So, what does it take to build a solid strategy that’s professional and adequate for your respective field? Keep on reading to discover some of the biggest secrets that social media marketing experts keep to themselves.

Know Your Audience, Know Your Audience, Know Your Audience!

We can’t stress the important of knowing your audience enough. Once again – learn about your audience before attempting to do anything else.

Social media marketing is all about addressing a specific group of people. The more niche and relatable your content is, the better your online reputation will become. When you have a good idea about your audience’s profile, you’ll know how to choose the right channels and how to put together a solid content plan.

Social media audience research is a task that requires time and effort. For a start, you may want to determine your market position. Are you addressing a current need or creating a brand new desire in buyers? What types of people will benefit from the products and services you have to sell? Where are these people located? Are they employed? How much money do they earn?

Doing competition research will give you some idea about the types of people you should be addressing. The same applies to doing paid social media promotion and setting the right demographic criteria. In fact, this is one of the simplest options for populating your communities with the right people and seeing a high return on investment.

Base the Content Strategy on Each Individual Channel

Here’s another essential to keep in mind – you can’t use the same content on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and the other social media profiles that you maintain. Each of these platforms has its specific audience and communication tools. Thus, you should have a separate content strategy for each of the channels that you’re on.

Multiple social media profiles require constant monitoring. You may start with a few of those but sooner or later, you’ll find out that your efforts should be focused on only a couple of channels that deliver the highest level of engagement for your brand.

You’ll learn a bit more about the content that’s best for each channel through experience. In the beginning, however, you may rely on the following tips to boost the relevance of your content strategies:

• Facebook posts: short texts, videos and images tend to benefit from the highest level of engagement. This social network offers quite a lot of versatility when it comes to the content that delivers the best results.
• Twitter: very brief sentences, slogans and images are ideal for the purpose of Twitter promotion. You can also post links to your website with brief captions.
• LinkedIn: opt for longer texts, as well as longer captions that lead to relevant links. When using LinkedIn, keep in mind that you’ll usually get best results by engaging in B2B promotion.
• Instagram: obviously, this channel is the one to use for the publication of photo and video content. Keep the captions short and look for good hashtags.
• Google+: images and links to your website accompanied by brief captions tend to see the highest level of engagement.

Make the Content Itself Good

This tip may seem like an obvious one but many companies ignore the importance of professionally created social media content.

If you don’t have the needed experience and the skills to push out consistent, good content on a regular basis, you should get professionals to do it. TopAussieWriters is just one example of a possibility that you can rely on.

Good posts have a hook, something that gets the audience eager to undertake a certain course of action. You may want to promise an answer to a pressing question, something funny or something that few people know.

When making such promises, you have to deliver. Clickbaiting is a bad strategy because it fools people into believing that you’ll give them something you simply can’t. It may work the first time around but sooner or later, you’ll start losing some of your audience.

Good content is also about regular scheduling. A good social media content strategy schedules updates for regular publication. There’s no need to make multiple updates across channels several times per day. If you only update your profiles once per month, however, it will simply be impossible to keep the audience engaged and coming back for more.

The final thing to remember is that you should constantly keep on checking the performance of your content strategy. Social media provides a lot of analytical information about your top posts, their reach and their engagement level. Find out which types of content gets the best response and which ones miss the mark. You can adjust the strategy on the basis of this information. Social media marketing is a real-time approach. If you’re not getting the return on investment that you desire, you can always modify the campaign to boost its relevance and see better results in the future.

Meet Jim Risner