4 Social Media Strategy Tips to Improve your Presence Today

Organic social media isn’t what it used to be. Up until recently, business owners didn’t need social media strategy tips because Facebook was basically just a never-ending conveyor belt of content and free traffic, with limited needed optimisations. Back then, even the smallest following and the most lackluster social media strategy could drive strong clicks and engagement.

However, today it isn’t so easy. Instead what tends to happen is every time you publish a post on Facebook it only reaches about 3-5% of your audience, possibly even less. Couple this with Facebook’s relentless attempts to keep users on their platform (not your website). A lot of people begin to ask, “what’s the point?”

Still, there are social media strategies that are worth their salt. Whether it’s paying for ads, or just continuing to pump out great content for that 5%… after all, if you gain a large enough social following, you may still only reach 5%, but the 5% may grow.

Often the key to a successful social media strategy, which encompasses all of the platforms that resonate with your audience, driving people back to your site, is quite simple. A healthy combination of paid and organic posts. Of course, paired with a consistent posting schedule, a healthy content mix, and a bit of data analysis.

Before you start running social media ads you need to know what types of content perform well organically. With this in mind, four social media strategy tips to help inform what types of content perform the best. Giving you a clear picture of what types of content will translate into high-performing social media ads.

Optimise Your Content Mix

Just in case you weren’t aware, a ‘content mix’ is the way in which you want to share your content. Rather than the platforms in which you’ve decided to use. For example, whether you share content via a blog, video, images, gifs, memes, tutorials, links and the rest!

Because the number of variations of content can be overwhelming and ever-expanding, it’s simpler to keep in simple terms. When sharing on social media (particularly Facebook), it’s typically one of these 4 content types:

• Photos
• Videos
• Links
• Curated Competitor Content

Depending on your business, the best ratio for your content mix may be different from a competitor. It’s easy to read about “the best ratio for content”, but the truth is, it’s often quite personal. After all, everyone has different ideas of what works best. For example, something that works for Apple, may not work as well for you.

This is why your businesses ideal content mix is going to be unique.

So how do you find your unique content mix?

Firstly, use the 4 categories listed above when determining your content mix. Keep track of how many photos, videos, and links you share on your social media channels.

Now, follow this process to optimize and improve your content mix over time!

1) Establish a Baseline
Often when you’re getting started, it’s best to just get started. By this, we mean to just do something. It’s always easier to review, adapt and improve upon something than to spend months developing a strategy, when you could be seeking to your fans! Maybe you decide to start by sharing two links, one piece of competitor content, a photo and a video every week.

Once you do it for a while, you’ve established your baseline. A baseline is something you can use to compare your results against in the future.

2) Analyze
After a few weeks, step back and analyze how successful your social media distribution has been. What worked. What hasn’t? Have you hit targets? If not, how can you improve going forward?

Maybe your videos are performing really well, while your photos aren’t as much. This is great information for your next step.

3) Optimize
Now that you know what’s working & what isn’t, tweak your content mix to improve your results. If you found that your videos are outperforming your photos, maybe you want to adjust your content mix to include 1 photo and 2 videos each day.

Maybe this will establish a new baseline for you. So do this for a while a reevaluate again in the future.

(READ: Turn Followers into Customers by Setting up Facebook Appointments)

Establish and Stick to a Schedule

For a social media strategy to work most effectively, Content is King, but consistency is key. To leverage the most success, employing a great social media schedule works great. It’s all good to use your own calendar to remind you to post. However, we recommend setting up an account on a scheduling platform.

Most platforms automatically publish your posts. If this scares you at first, you can enable it to notify you and you publish via the app. On the scheduling platforms such as Sendible, Hootsuite, Buffer and the rest, you can schedule your posts months in advance, taking away the rush and stress when you need to get your post out mid-week. Depending on the platform and package you choose, you may be required to pay to use the scheduling app.

Still, if you’re not into paying for it, Facebook allows you to schedule ahead of time inside the platform, as well.

The bottom line is, a robust plan is essential for your social media strategy. Adding to this, we recommend scheduling beforehand, in addition to planning your posts months before you schedule them.

Because you are likely a highly stressed, overwhelmed, strapped for time and with a limited budget, scheduling in batches ahead of time, can allow you to focus on your other worries; ultimately giving you more freedom throughout the rest of the day.

Remember People Judge a Book by its Cover

In other words, packaging and design matters.

This is something that’s important to keep in mind with content distribution on social media. It doesn’t matter which channel or platform. Whether it is on your business Instagram page, your blog, your optimized email lists, email signatures, or your web pages, keep it consistent across channels.

You may have written an insightful goldmine of a blog post. But that doesn’t matter if your blog looks unprofessional, cluttered and poorly designed. Despite the immense value to your target audience, it can provide.

If your blog post looks unprofessional, is hard to read, or looks unappealing… Most people simply won’t read it.

Social media today is a whirlwind of messages. Packed full of ads and posts which are all competing for your target audiences attention. What’s worse is people are becoming more and more aware and resilient to messaging, with an exceptional filter for the unauthentic.

So if you want to get and keep their attention and make them click on your content, take interest and read it, you can’t just push your content. You have to SELL it.

An example of this is using “thumb-stopping” colours and images for your content. Whether it’s a header image on a blog post that will catch peoples attention when sharing to Facebook, or a killer image that sets you apart from the competition.

Garrett Holmes, Digital Marketer’s Head of Content, said it best: “I’ve posted to social media many, many, many times, and I find that when I use bright yellow or red I tend to get the best results. These “thumb-stopping” colours just naturally stand out against the blue theme of Facebook.”

It’s not always easy to find new and interesting designs and ways to capture people’s attention while scrolling. However, there are some excellent resources out there. For example, check out the UX Trends of 2019 to get a better idea!

(READ: Avoid Making these 3 Ad Copy Mistakes to Improve your Search Success)

Use CTR Analysis in Your Social Media Strategy 

Here is another process Holmes recommends when analyzing your effectiveness in your social sphere.

Basically, he advises using CTR analysis in your social media strategy to inform your paid social media advertising. Don’t worry, we’ll explain.

When implementing this data-driven calculation, you can figure out if you’re delivering the right content to your audience. All the while, improving the performance of content on social media and find out which content performs the best.

All the while, helping to give you content ideas for the future based on data.

He calls it a Click-Through Rate (CTR) Analysis.

The first step is to calculate your CTR for each post. Getting your CTR is pretty simple:

CTR = Link Clicks / Reach

Here’s where you’ll find those metrics:

A key to this is to NOT go by Post Clicks. Instead, Link Clicks. Do this for all your recent posts. Once you’ve gathered your data, put them into a spreadsheet and rank them according to their CTR.

Now separate the posts into 3 tiers (top, middle, bottom). Then take these actions based on where each post falls in the hierarchy:

Top CTR Posts
If one of your posts has a CTR within the top 25%, then you know a particular post is performing well. In this case, it would be an excellent idea to recirculate the post later. When you do this, don’t change anything about it.

This works well because typically only a small percentage of your followers get the chance to see your posts. When you repost, you’re likely to catch more fish in your net, while likely not catching the same one twice.

Base on the results from the first post, the second should perform well. Maybe in another few weeks, it’s time to repost it again! For the third time around, do some testing. Maybe change the image or headline. You’ll likely find you’ll appeal to a different segment of your audience.

Middle CTR Posts
For middle posts, in terms of its CTR, you should recirculate, but not as is. Instead, make adjustments and repackage it to try and improve the appeal. Now repost it and look at the data at the end.

Bottom CTR Posts
Typically for these underperforming posts, you know something about it isn’t right for your audience. Still, try to repackage and recirculate it. However, if the repackaged version doesn’t make for an improvement in performance, then cut your losses and not repost again!

Now Translate This to Your Paid Advertising Efforts
Going through your CTR in this way is a powerful tool to not only understand what your audience loves to see, but allows you valuable information for paid efforts. If you know ‘Post A’ performed exceptionally well organically, this is a post that is worth your money for boosting.

If you boost an exceptional post, you’ll reach more individuals. They may be individuals who do follow you or ones who don’t… yet.

Take Action

Now because you have a better idea of how to think about and assess your content and social media, it’s time to act. You can now produce content which resonates with your audience and provides a positive ROI through your updated social media strategy.

Remember where your content fits into the customer value journey and optimize it to do a better job of achieving its top-of-funnel goals.

Keep in mind, creating great content isn’t enough anymore, because social media channels have such complex algorithms. Meaning even if you implement all of our social media strategy tips, your content will not organically reach everyone.

So you’ll need to do all you can to get your CTR up. Whether it’s improving your design, captions or implementing a boosting strategy, it’s so important to make sure you’re getting the best results possible from your social media content.

As an up-and-coming digital marketing agency in Perth, we try to take on as many social media strategy tips as possible. So it goes without saying (but we’ll say it anyway), that we use these strategies ourselves. Not only that, we use them for all of our clients who use our social media services. From Perth and beyond.

With this in mind, if you’re looking for any content and social media services here in Perth or Australia-wide, contact us today!

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