Social media is one of the most effective ways to market your brand, yet this method remains fairly new to many marketers. Social media presents marketers to connect directly with potential leads and customers, grow their brand awareness and build a community to boost customer engagement and loyalty.
According to Statista, out of 5.45 billion internet users (67% of the global population), 5.17 billion were social media users. The average time users spend on social media in a day amounted to 143 minutes.
This emphasizes the importance of social media in people’s lives and how you can leverage it to reach them. But, social media marketing does not work by just solely being present over a number of platforms. You need to make a proper strategy for it to nurture the favourable results. If you are just getting started with social media marketing, this blog post helps you craft an efficacious social media strategy.
Let’s begin!
What is a Social Media Strategy?
Social media strategy is a complete plan of how you will use social media platforms to drive brand awareness, engagement, and leads. During the making of your social media strategy you will need to clearly outline how you will create posts, and engage with your audience & how often, what are your goals, and what metric you need to check your performance.
Why Do You Need a Social Media Strategy in 2025?
Crafting a social media strategy is important because it keeps you on the right path, prevents you from overlooking what’s important and avoids distractions. Here are some other reasons why you need a social media strategy to excel in social media marketing:
Consistency
Consistency is the key to success on social media. Creating a strategy will help you regularly post your content across various platforms, especially during the peak times when it matters the most. Apart from maintaining consistency in posting, social media strategy also helps you maintain a consistent tone in your various posts across various platforms.
Long-term
Having a proper plan ensures you are keeping your goals on the top and aren’t distracted with irrelevant trends. Regular monitoring and updating content allows you to establish authority and reputation that will last for a long time.
Efficiency
With a solid plan you can effortlessly allocate your time and resources to areas that are most important to you. It allows you to clearly understand which channels to leverage, which activities to do there, and how to monitor your performance all along.
What is a Social Media Marketing Funnel?
Before heading onto creating a strategy for social media, you need to lay a framework that will help you create a guiding way for your customers to drive them towards the buying process on social media. This framework is regarded as a social media marketing funnel.
When you will create your social media strategy you will create some different stages each designed for a unique purpose ultimately leading the customer toward your end goal: buying. All these stages are part of the funnel, as clearly defined in the given figure.
Why is it Important to Understand the Social Media Strategy Funnel?
To optimise all your marketing efforts/content pieces so they stimulate the user actions into going closer towards the buying process. The more effectively you understand these stages, the more easily you will eliminate the friction throughout the way and create content that guides the users smoothly.
In simple words, the stages of a funnel define what type of content you need to create, where you need to post it and how often, to drive results. This is well explained in the example given below.
What are the Steps to Create a Social Media Strategy?
Define Your Goals
Understanding what your goals are, what you want to achieve through social media will dictate your entire strategy. Once your goals are defined, each post your create or effort you make will perfectly align with what you want to achieve.
The first thing to understand while setting a goal is to realise where your plan lies on the sales funnel. In most cases usually, it’s at the top as social media is commonly used to raise brand awareness.
But for you it may be different such as encouraging customers by sharing user generated content. That’s why it’s important to be clear with your conceptual knowledge and establish well defined and realistic goals.
After this step, determine who are you trying to reach, where are they present the most, what kind of content they interact with often and what types of tools can help you with this process.
Study Your Competition
It’s important to be aware of what your customers are already enjoying so that you can go a step ahead and stay competitive. This is specially true if you are a B2B business as many B2B businesses have overlapping audiences. Studying your audience and competitors will help you get valuable insights into customers’ preference and behaviour.
Identify Your Audience
Next step is to understand who are you doing all this for!
This is important because the result of your efforts will greatly depend on whether it interests your audience. And, all of this begins with knowing who your audience is.
The most effective way to identify your audience is to develop customer personas. These personas represent the people to whom your content interests.
Here are common things that customer personas include:
- Demographics – This mainly includes age, job title, salary, gender, location, etc.
- Interests – The topics your customers often engage with. What solutions do they commonly look for?
- Their objective of searching what you offer– Are they fitness freak? Looking for courses? Looking for a job? To find a software solution to save them time? Etc.
- Where are they active the most – Social platform that they use often?
- Type of content they consume – Are they indulging more in text based posts or videos? What type of brands or individuals do they follow?
Define Your Brand’s Voice
Now, it’s time to focus on content creation. The content you share online shapes your brand image in the audience’s perspective. So, be sure to have a solid story line and purposeful network. Drawing and retaining the prospects will be greatly driven by how you show them your content.
Here is how you can do it:
Define Your Messaging
Begin with defining the core messages that demonstrate the vision of your brands. Put emphasis on what your brand stands for. This prepares a base for meaningful relationships with your customers.
Fine-Tune Your Profile
Your social profiles are the first place where your audience will learn about you, so make sure to include all the necessary details here. The basic details are your business name, contact details, company information, and anything else that a customer might seek regarding your business.
Please note that keyword research tools can help you use the most searched words and phrases in your content.
Engage in Social Conversations.
Engagement is the cornerstone of social media marketing. It is not merely all about posting content. It’s about participating in conversations that resonate with your audience.
Replying to people’s queries is the best way to boost engagement. You can respond to your customers via replies and comments. Make sure you are not forgetting to include a fun element in whatever you do.
Here are the best ways you can start interacting with your customers:
1. Create Interactive Content
Don’t unilaterally provide content to your audience. Instead, listen to their needs and ask them questions. Live streams, polls, and surveys are just for that! All you have to do is invite your audience and ask them to share their opinions. This will support two-sided conversation.
2. Manage Groups and Forums
Break into online groups or forums, etc, as they can effortlessly strengthen your social media presence by building communities. Share your expertise by offering solutions in the groups. Getting involved in the discussions is a great way to build authority and trust within your niche.
3. Respond to Social Media Posts
When you openly engage with your audience, it showcases you really value their opinion and strive to make their experience better with what you offer.
Audit Your Channels
Review how your past strategies worked. You can do this by examining how your previous engagement methods performed. Based on the success of these strategies, filter the best-performing ones and pinpoint how they could be refined even more. Don’t overlook where you lack, and make sure your new strategy is not based on mere assumptions.
Here is what you should assess from the past:
- Which channels did not help you achieve your goals
- Do you have any outdated or bugs anywhere that are ruining the experience for your users or making you not look trustworthy
- Have irrelevant content
Based on what you find out in the above assessment, move forward with growing your efforts on the platforms where you have the most success. It’s worth noting that you should regularly update your ideal customer profiles and any other assets for better targeting.
Set your Key Performance Indicators.
KPIs are crucial for tracking progress. When deciding your KPIs, make sure they are specific, quantifiable, and realistic.
Here are some indicators that you can match with your social media strategy:
- Engagement rate of your content
- Your content’s reach among your target audience
- Leads generated through your campaigns
- Cost spent per lead
Choose your Social Media Platforms.
Now that you have identified which social media platforms helped you achieve your goals, you know where to focus most of your efforts. Increase your focus on the channels that are getting you desirable results. Make sure that you have a consistent brand voice across all channels while not forgetting that you also need a unique content strategy for each platform for maximum efficacy.
Popular Social Media Channels
With users crossing three billion Facebook continues to be one of the most widely used social media marketing for marketing. Here are the top reasons why marketers find it quite useful:
- Facebook constantly updates its trends and technologies, introducing features like live streaming, AR, stories, and VR.
- Its interface is highly intuitive and user-friendly, which is why many consumers have started looking for products and services on Facebook more often.
- It has a variety of features, allowing marketers to interact with the audience in variety of ways.
- You don’t need to spend money to use most of its features.
Twitter is estimated to cross over 335 millions users in 2025. Twitters allows businesses to interact with customers in real time. Moreover, it supports a vareity of content types such as blog posts, infographics and videos.
Twitter analytics can offer great insights into consumer trends, preferences, etc.
Instagram is expected to reach 1.44 billion users by 2025. It is a widely popular social media platform among people aged 18 to 34. 90% of all users who are on Instagram at least follow one business account. 83% of users use it to find products and services. The constant rolling of exciting features has made it top choice for social media marekters to promtoe thier brand.
Youtube
It is expected to cross 1.1 billion users in 2028. India, the US and Brazil are among the top countries with the most active YouTube users.
Then there are other platforms such as Linkedin, Pinterest, TikTok, Snapchat and Google Business Profile.
You can also enhance your brand presence over forums like Reddit, Quora, etc. Engaging on these forums can help you build your brand authority and trustworthiness.
Create a Social Media Calendar
A content calender can help you stay consistent with your posting practice. It will provide you an overview about what to and when to post .
Here is the information that you can include in your calendar:
- Social media platform where you are going to be active
- Posting schedule for all types of content
- Your target audience
- Performance tracking
- Budget
Social Media Strategies Examples
When starting something crucial, it’s best to first look at someone who has done it in an iconic way to take inspiration and stay on the right path throughout the journey.
Nike
Nike tops the list when it comes to who does cross-promotional activities the best. They are highly active on social media, sharing initiatives such as influencer collaborations and more.
They run dedicated social media accounts for different categories, such as sports, countries and even cities.
This is how they are flawlessly personalizing content for their target audience.
Apple
Apple took internet by storm when it launched its “Study with me” campaign in 2023. This 90 minute video showcased how students can focus 25 minutes on study sessions followed by 5 minutes breaks to boost productivity. This video generated over 18 million views on YouTube.
Wrapping Up
Whether you are a small business or a large, social media marketing can level up your brand presence significantly. A well thought social media strategy will save you time, encourage you implement all your efforts and not let anything go in vain. So, whenver you are starting promotions on any channel, be sure to start with a solid strategy.