How to improve your social media strategy: 7 handy tips

Breaking through a saturated social media feed to reach your target audience can be tough. You’re competing with dancing cockatoos and singing huskies, and that can be hard to beat. But it is possible to create a successful social media strategy to help your brand gain followers, boost engagement, increase organic traffic to your website and so much more.

If you’re ready to engage with the four billion people that use social media, you’re in the right place. In this guide, we have rounded up our top seven tips that can improve your existing social media strategy.

What is a social media marketing strategy?

Social media marketing involves using social media to market your business. The power of social media really is phenomenal and it can help you to reach new audiences, show off your brand and create your own identity.

But before you dive in, you need to first create a strategy. This doesn’t need to be a long, fancy document but simply a plan that outlines what, where and when you plan to post. It might include information about what you need to create (video, text, photos) and a schedule of when you will be posting these things. It could even include your preferred hashtags so you don’t always have to find new ones.

If you’re unsure of what you’ll be posting and where, don’t worry. Below, we talk you through how to create and improve your social media marketing strategy.

How to improve your social media marketing strategy

1. Get professional support

Starting a social media strategy from scratch may be daunting, particularly if it isn’t something you’ve done before.

If you’re unsure of how to use social media for your brand, you can enlist some professional help. A social media management team can conduct relevant audits if you have existing social media profiles and take care of your social posts for you. They will likely create your content, optimise your posts and schedule them to go live at the optimal time.

If you aren’t ready to entirely hand over the reins, social media training may be a better option for your team. The experts can pass on their knowledge and give you the confidence you need to control your own social media channels.

2. Identify your audience

Knowing your target audience is important information for a social strategy, as it can identify which platforms are best and which should be avoided. For instance, over 70% of the UK’s Pinterest users are female, while on X, 63% of the global users are male.

Consider who your audience is (incorporating age, gender, location and interests) and then think about which social media platforms they’re more likely to use. Do a bit of market research to find this data if it helps.

For a younger target audience, you might want to think about creating TikTok content. Research shows their audience is predominantly female and aged 18-24.

3. Set KPIs and goals

While you could blindly wander into the realm of social media and hope for the best, it may be a better strategy to think about the results you want and how you will achieve them.

Do you want to gain followers and reach potential new customers? Perhaps you want to sell products through social media and build revenue. Maybe the channels will simply be a customer-service function for consumers that need help. Your goals will help to determine which channels you should use and how you should use them.

Your KPIs might be very specific, ranging from ‘X number of likes’ to ‘Create 20 posts in the first month’. You might set yourself a goal to experiment with hashtags to improve your post reach or track brand mentions to see what people are saying about your brand. It doesn’t necessarily matter what your goals are, but it’s important to create a strategy that will help you reach them.

4. Use multiple platforms

If you join every social platform, you’ll spread yourself very thin, and potentially exhaust yourself in the first few weeks. It’s not about the quantity of accounts but the quality of your accounts, so you should choose which platforms you will use wisely.

First, use the information you gathered in tip two, and think about which channels your audience will use the most. Initially, you may want to just set up a couple of accounts, picking the platforms that are most suitable or applicable for your business.

Second, consider the type of content you’ll be posting. TikTok and Instagram favour short videos, Pinterest favours photos and X generally favours text. Will it be better to engage with your audience via text, photos or videos? Your answer may reveal which platforms are right for you.

5. Post regular content

Once you’ve chosen the best social channels for your business and created a profile, it’s time to start posting content regularly.

Generally, each social platform has its own algorithm and its own posting preferences, though these can only be guessed at. TikTok announced that users should aim to post one to four times a day “to test how different types of content are received”. The rules for Facebook and Instagram are a little more blurred. Experiment with how often you post and the times you post at to see which posts are more successful.

If you do use multiple platforms, and post regularly on each of them, be consistent with your tone of voice and branding too. This should be the same across all channels even if the content is different.

Some content ideas include:

• News stories – things that are interesting, relevant, newsworthy,
• Images and videos – videos are huge and will remain so. They’re one of the most popular forms of content on the internet. Create behind the scenes videos, merchandise production, etc.
• Storytelling – reveal the face or the team behind the brand, introduce your fellow colleagues, etc.
• Trends – TikTok constantly has new ‘trends’ that you can recreate. If they’re relevant to your brand, have fun with them and try to bring in some views/follows.
• Case studies – while your social media should predominantly be fun and engaging content, you can boost your brand with some fascinating case studies showcasing your successes and customer testimonials.

6. Engage with your audience

Engagement is key to social media. You want engagement from your followers in the form of likes, comments, shares, views and more. But it’s a two-way street and responding to them is so important.

If your content is engaging, then your audience will respond. You can even encourage engagement via prompts, asking them to tag their friends, like your post, vote on a poll or comment with an answer to a question. A great example of this recently came from the official Great British Bake Off Instagram page. Their post received more than 3,000 comments in three days.

Where possible, respond to the engagement with your page. Take the time to reply to comments and DMs (where appropriate), like your brand mentions and respond to any criticism/feedback.

7. Track your progress and constantly reassess

Tracking the results is arguably one of the most important aspects of your social media strategy. It’s a chance for you to see what works and what doesn’t. It might allow you to narrow down the type of content you’re creating so your strategy is more efficient, focusing more on what brings positive results instead of wasting time on content that brings the least success.

As long as all of your social profiles are business accounts, you should be able to access analytics, giving you insights into impressions, likes, shares and more. It may provide more helpful data about when your target audience is online or the optimal times for posting.

Click Consult has a well-versed team of social media experts, who can lay out a strategy that complements your own efforts, as well as your search strategy. They can analyse your KPIs and goals, conduct a social media audit and create and post engaging content to deliver the strategy your brand deserves.