A Comprehensive Social Media Strategy Template: From Audience Research to Social Media Audits

Social media has evolved into one of the most important marketing channels for businesses of all kinds. It’s also become a crowded marketplace, with millions of companies vying for attention on every platform. To stand out you need not only amazing content, but also a strong social media strategy. The prospect is daunting for many business owners, but you can make it easier by using a social media strategy template.

Our social media strategy template is built for small to medium-sized businesses that aren’t getting the results they want from their existing social media profiles. We’ll give you the key steps you need to:

This social media strategy template is designed to help you create an overarching social media strategy for your business, but you can also use it to develop individual marketing campaigns.

How to use this social media strategy template

This social media strategy template is intended to help you create an overall strategy for your social media marketing, but can also be used to develop promotional plans for an individual product/service launch or sale. The examples contained within are intended as prompts and should not be copy-pasted directly into your own strategy documents.

To simplify this process, we’ve divided this social media strategy template into three sections: plan, action, and review.

Plan

A detailed plan with clear goals and parameters is the foundation of any successful marketing strategy and the core of this social media strategy template.

You can create your plan in the following steps:

Research your audience(s)

Create demographic profiles for your target audience and adjacent audiences (people outside your core audience who may also be interested in your products). To craft effective marketing messages, you need to understand who your primary audiences are: what they look like, where they hang out online, and who they’re already communicating with on social media.

Assuming you already have a social media presence, you can get this information directly from your followers. Take a look at their profiles. Are they predominantly men? Women? Organizations? Do they share any other easily identifiable features, like skin color or age? These fundamental traits are the basis for your demographics profiles.

Your initial demographics profiles should look something like this:

Once you’ve established these basics, you can dive deeper into your audience’s interests. Who are they following on social media? What do they share on their accounts? Do they mention their jobs on their profiles, and if so, what fields do they typically work in? What hobbies do they participate in? The more details you can fill in, the more you can tailor your marketing message to your customers’ needs.

Another way companies like to organize this research is by creating a customer persona. This is a fictional person based on a combination of general market data and data gathered from your existing audience. For example, you might use the demographics information above to create the following customer:

Social media analysis, polls, and surveys can then help you expand the profile to look something like this:

You can then develop the rest of your social media strategy based on what will appeal to your target audience. For example, if Susan was my primary audience, I might actively share articles on technological developments to catch her interest.

Develop Key Performance Indicators

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are the measurements you’ll use to figure out how effective your current social media efforts are. For example, if your primary goal is to increase brand awareness, one of your KPIs might be the number of new Instagram followers you gain in a specific time period.

Do a social media audit

Take a long, hard look at your social media analytics. How well do your efforts stack up when measured against your KPIs? What kinds of posts have already been successful on your profiles? What posts have failed to attract any attention whatsoever?

Assess the profiles themselves as well. Are you using current imagery that is consistent across all social media channels? Do your bios have current information and links? Have you included relevant keywords or hashtags? Are any facts out of date or links broken?

You can use our five-step social media audit process to simplify this part of developing your social media strategy.

Define SMART objectives for your social media marketing

We could have made our own acronym for this social media strategy template, but why reinvent the wheel? The SMART framework focuses on creating goals that are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-bound. For example, a SMART social media marketing goal would be to gain 1,000 followers in three months.

Early on, your goals should focus on building brand visibility and gaining more followers. You’ll also want to set a timeframe for each goal. We find that three months is long enough to gain significant statistical data so you can pivot effectively, without becoming so long that it actively harms your business.

Keeping those details in mind, your first set of objectives might look something like this:

When you reach 5,000-10,000 followers on a given social network, you’ll want to shift your focus to developing relationships with your existing audience so you can turn followers into customers. At this stage of your business, your objectives might look something like this:

Define your social media brand voice

Your social media brand voice is the tone and style you use in your social media marketing. You probably already have some idea of what this is; for example, you probably know whether you want a humorous tone or a serious one.

Now that you’ve completed your social media audit, you can refine this further. Tailor your social media brand voice to suit your brand’s core values, your audience, and your marketing goals. Create a brand style guide to ensure that everything you publish on social media fits with your brand voice. This document will become even more useful as your business grows and you start hiring people to work on your social media.

If you plan to use your style guide as a guide for employees who will help manage your social media accounts you may also want to include specific anti-discrimination policies.

Create a social media calendar

Sometimes referred to as an editorial calendar, a social media calendar dictates what content is shared on your social media profiles and when that content is shared. You can incorporate this into your larger marketing calendar, or keep it as a separate document.

Your social media calendar should also include time to share others’ content and engage with followers. This can be anywhere from a few minutes to one hour a day.

This social media calendar ensures a consistent publishing schedule on three of the largest social media platforms without extending your resources too far. When you’re launching a product or service you’ll want to build your promotional campaign around your existing content schedule. This will make sure that even during launch you have a steady stream of content that isn’t self-promotional.

Action

Once you’ve created a plan, it’s time to take action. There are only two steps in this section of the social media strategy template, but don’t be fooled: putting your social media strategy into action is one of the most time-consuming parts of the process. And you want to invest the time. You won’t be able to measure the success of your plan if you don’t execute it properly.

So, let’s get started!

Develop content

You want to develop as much of your social media content in advance as possible. This makes it easy to schedule and publish regular posts on each social media profile. If you share social media duties with some of your employees this also gives everyone a pool of content to draw from.

Using the social media calendar example above as our guide, the first thing you’ll want to do is create an extensive list of content you want to share on Twitter and Facebook. Your list should include the title of each piece, the name of the people or organization who created it, and the link.

Once you’ve got these links, you can share them in three main ways:

• With the title as the caption of your post
• Using a quote from the article as the caption of your post
• With your overall impression of the article as the caption of your post

You can create an additional list like this for old articles you want to feature on your social media profiles and schedule those manually as well, but we strongly recommend using a plugin like Revive Old Post to automate the sharing of older articles instead. This will greatly reduce your workload in the long run.

You’ll want to take a different approach to create content for Instagram because the platform is more visual and success relies on publishing high-quality original images. Set a timer for 5-10 minutes and brainstorm all the things you could possibly photograph, draw, or otherwise legally obtain images of.

Each one of these categories potentially represents dozens of individual photo opportunities. For example, here’s what a brainstorm around the topic “your workspace” might look like:

• Desk
• Computer on desk
• Calendar behind desk
• Printer
• Reference bookshelf
• Filing cabinet
• Organization system inside filing cabinet

Once you’ve gathered all of these ideas, you’re ready to take some photos! You can take some of these pictures on the go, but we recommend taking photos in batches so you can schedule them in advance. This also gives you time to take the best photos possible and even do some light editing.

Schedule social media posts

Choose a social media scheduling tool like Hootsuite or Buffer and start plugging your posts into their system. Many entrepreneurs like to schedule a full week or even a month in advance. We’ve even known business owners who scheduled certain posts a full year in advance.

Most social media scheduling services offer a free tier, but this often comes with a limit on the number of posts you can schedule at once. If you want to go beyond this limit, you will need to sign up for one of their paid plans.

Make sure you track when you schedule each post. You don’t want to repeat posts too often, as this will irritate your followers and potentially even break the rules of certain social media platforms.

Review

With the aid of this social media strategy template, you’ve developed a social media calendar, created a variety of content for your social media profiles, and scheduled your posts at least one week in advance. At this point, many small business owners would pat themselves on the back and call it a job well done. Smart marketers, on the other hand, know this is only the beginning. To ensure success you need to regularly review your social media analytics.

You can do this in two steps:

Measure your progress

Take some notes and continue with the content you planned using this social media strategy template. When you reach the end of three months, do another social media audit and move on to the next step.

Adjust your strategy

The key to long-term marketing success is the ability to adapt: first to modify a social media strategy template to fit your specific needs, then to adapt your marketing campaigns based on the data you receive from your analytics. This is the step where you consider strategies like posting at different hours, posting more often, or targeting different hashtags. To learn more about how you can make the right adjustments, check out our guide to data-driven marketing campaigns.

Final advice

The world of social media is always changing, but you will maintain steady growth through it all if you follow the basic principles of this social media strategy template. Here are the main steps again:

And of course, remember that your social media strategy template is only the beginning. Social media success takes consistent work and dedication.

Have you ever used a template like this before? Did you find it useful? Let us know in the comments section below!

By Dianna Gunn

Dianna Gunn is an SEO strategist and freelance writer who provides content solutions to businesses of all shapes and sizes at www.thedabbler.ca