Social Media Content Strategy: How to Build an Engaging Plan

Social media marketing is an essential element of a marketing strategy. According to a 2024 Statista report, 86 percent of businesses use Facebook as part of their marketing efforts, 79 percent use Instagram, and 65 percent use LinkedIn [1]. 

If your business has a presence on social media, you will need to develop a social media content strategy. A content strategy for your social media presence can increase web traffic and enable you to reach new customers and continue building relationships with existing ones. 

Discover the steps you should take to design your social media content strategy by setting your objectives, developing a buyer persona, and creating a content schedule.

A step-by-step guide to building a social media content strategy

An effective social media content strategy goes beyond simply creating content. You need to ensure that the right people see your content and that you get across the message you’re trying to promote. 

A social media content strategy is your plan for getting the most out of your content—it helps you design your content, relate it to your audience, schedule it for maximum viewing, track and measure each piece’s performance, and align it with special events and product launches.

Discover the steps needed to design and implement your social media content strategy. 

1. Define goals and objectives.

The first step to creating a content strategy is knowing what you’re setting out to achieve. Your social media content plan should align with your business’s overall marketing goals and aim to increase your reach and conversions. For example, if one of your business goals is to boost a particular product’s sales, focus your social media content on promoting this product, using external links to sales pages, or driving customers into your sales funnel.

When defining your goals, create SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-based) goals so you can measure your results. For example: Generate 15% more Facebook leads in the next 6 months.

2. Understand your target audience.

To start creating your content strategy, you must understand your customers’ interests and motivations and what they’re looking for. You can conduct audience research to gather this customer and audience data, including their demographics, such as age, gender, profession, location, and interests. You can perform this research by engaging with your customers via surveys and focus groups and using analytics software to explore historical data about who visits your website and makes a purchase.

Knowing this information about your customers and audience allows you to create a buyer persona, a fictional representation of your ideal customer. Adjusting your content strategy to target users with this persona will help you streamline your marketing efforts and produce personalized content. 

3. Choose the right platforms and content types.

Creating your buyer persona can help you determine the right platform to showcase your brand because you know their ages and preferences, enabling you to pinpoint their interests and which social media channels they spend time on. For example, if your target audience is 17-19 and prefers short-form video content, you might find them on TikTok. However, LinkedIn might serve you best if your target audience is business owners, meaning business-to-business (B2B) sales. 

After determining which social media platforms host your target audience, consider your business, the type of content you want to create, and which site will best showcase that type of content. You don’t need to be on all platforms, but you might choose more than one. Certain products and services do better on different platforms. For example, businesses promoting photo and video content in the retail, food, beverage, and luxury industries do well on platforms like Instagram because it’s visually based. 

However, if you have a professional service business, you might do well on LinkedIn because it’s ideal for making professional connections, which account for most B2B marketing leads and result in the highest visitor-to-lead conversion rate among social media platforms. You can research each platform to determine how they meet your needs. 

Content types

Consider which types of content your audience will enjoy and will effectively showcase your products and brand. These might include:

• Written copy, such as blogs, articles, and guides

• Images

• Infographics

• Short videos or reels

• Video stories

• User-generated content (UGC), such as customers’ photos and videos, or product reviews 

• Reposts

• Influencer content and partnerships

• Live streams

4. Plan and schedule content.

Once you’ve decided on the type of content you want to make and the platforms you will build a following on, it’s time to plan your content. Developing and putting content out there requires careful planning because what you release and when determines the content’s effectiveness. When you plan your content, think back to your buyer persona and their interests and preferences, and create content with them in mind, ensuring that it aligns with your company’s goals. 

You can research hashtags to find the relevant content your competitors are posting and measure their success so you can use the most effective hashtags on your content. You can also use tools to brainstorm and create content. 

Planning and scheduling your content helps you stay organized and avoid last-minute panics about what to post. It also allows you to build campaigns around your business goals on multiple platforms. For example, if you’re launching a product, your posts may focus on the new product in the build-up to its release, creating momentum and excitement to buy among your customers.

5. Develop a content calendar.

Developing your content in advance helps keep everything organized and on target. A good content plan also includes a content calendar, which is a schedule of when each social media post will go out. You can create your content calendar in an Excel spreadsheet or a specialized template. 

You will align your content with key dates, such as holidays, product launches, and business goals. Then, you can decide how often to post according to your marketing goals and add the timeline to your content calendar—recording each post’s posting date and time, the required images or videos, captions, and hashtags. 

Creating your content calendar can be time-consuming if you post on numerous social media platforms. To streamline the process, you can utilize content calendar tools and post-scheduling software, such as Hootsuite or Buffer. These tools allow you to enter your posts into a calendar, and the software will automatically post each piece of content to the target social media channel on the scheduled date and time. 

6. Track analytics and measure performance.

Your social media content strategy should be flexible and informed by what works well and what does not. You need to track and analyze key metrics to understand whether your content is effective in helping you reach your goals, like increasing return on investment (ROI) and building brand awareness. Some of the metrics you might track include engagement, such as the number of likes and comments on a post, click-throughs to a sales page or website, and lead conversions. 

You can use each platform’s built-in social media analytics or tools like Google Analytics to determine which posts perform the best. You may also use a social media management platform, such as Buffer, to track your metrics across different social media platforms in one place. You can view charts, graphs, and reports to assess your metrics and use this data to make decisions, including whether to repurpose content or change the content medium or posting time. 

7. Monitor trends for social media content.

Social media is constantly evolving, and you will always find new trends emerging. It’s essential to keep up with trends to determine what your audience wants to engage with so you can decide whether participating in that trend is right for your brand. 

One current trend is videos. TikTok is well known for its trending videos, and short-form videos remain popular across all social media platforms. Customers prefer videos because they’re engaging and can be shared quickly and easily.

Another trend is the single-stop platform. Platforms like TikTok, which began as a content-sharing app, have become much more. Customers can now shop directly from creators on TikTok, similar to Meta’s Facebook Marketplace.

A common theme among trends is authenticity. Customers want to know they can trust your brand. You can use authenticity in your content strategy when developing evergreen content. In addition, while AI is becoming a popular way to create content, audiences still want to engage with real people. You can optimize this desire for engagement in your content by introducing employees in “meet the team” posts and posting employee content.

8. Engage with your audience.

A large part of a social media content strategy includes engagement. Engaging with your audience helps you define whether your content is effective. By producing content that consumers like and interactive content like polls and competitions, you can increase engagement and build relationships with your customers and followers. This engagement increases your reach, which is how many people see your content. 

A strong social media presence also includes excellent customer service and social listening. Customers message, comment, and talk about your brand; you must tune into that discussion and respond effectively. Customers value authenticity, and seeing a brand communicate and engage with its customers on a platform by answering questions and posting UGC, such as customer reviews and photos, and videos of customers using products, builds trust. 

Develop an effective social media content strategy with Coursera.

Your social media content strategy helps you effectively define your goals and create content that supports your business objectives. Check out Meta’s Social Media Marketing Professional Certificate on Coursera to learn more about social media marketing. In this six-course series, you’ll learn how to design a social media presence, create social media campaigns, and increase your brand engagement.