Identify your brand and key messages and rewrite them or elaborate.
If this sounds overwhelming, then we’ve got a whole other guide to discovering your brand you may need to check out. But if you know what your brand is, then you will need to incorporate that into your content strategy with a consistent voice and messaging.
Make sure you’re communicating your key messages and a consistent voice with an editorial calendar.
An editorial calendar will help you cohesively look at your content plan over time (usually a year). Planning out your content month by month, by listing what topics you will be talking about and when to start promoting specials and events, will help you have a plan so that you will be better prepared to communicate your brand and mission in all that you do.
Helpful tip: Don’t forget to look at your data! Analyze your data and look at your most popular posts. That will help you figure out what your followers want to know about your company. If you feel like your data isn’t giving you much insight, make new data! Send out a poll or questionnaire and ask your followers what they would like to know. Frequently asked questions are also a great place to look for content ideas.
Find or create hashtags that best line up with your brand.
Be findable! Hashtags are often the SEO of social. Do some research and find hashtags that best align with your company brand, products, and services. Post those in the comments of your posts to help people find relevant content. If you are using hashtags as natural language within a post, only use about 3 hashtags.
Still stumped? Stalk your crush.
If you’re still not sure where to start, do a little more research. You’re likely already on social media, so look at the companies that you admire and follow and watch what they do. Think about what you’ve learned about content strategy and try to find ways to apply what they do to your social strategy. We usually find it’s best to do what you are already doing. So if you take a lot of videos naturally, think about incorporating that into your content strategy. If you find that you love blogging and writing more than social, think about blogging for your company. If you would rather produce social content than long-form content (like a blog) then think about the kind of content you would like to post such as updates, news, daily life, tips. Look at how your favorite social crushes do it and think of how you can implement things in your strategy.
For example, if you’re a service company and you find that most of your peers are on Twitter when you go to conferences, consider getting a Twitter account. If your company is very visually-driven, like a design company, look at your favorite interior designers and follow and watch how they incorporate social media into their work. Maybe they’re posting before and after photos or design inspiration, and that’s something you could also do.
Related: A Data-driven Content Strategy
Next Up: How to Create a Content Strategy (Part 3): Breaking Down Strategic Communication through a Campaign
