A social media strategy is a plan that defines your goals, identifies the platforms your audience actually uses, and maps out the content and execution process needed to produce measurable results. Research shows that 97 percent of Fortune 100 companies rely on social media, yet many small businesses struggle to get comparable results because they lack a clear strategy built around their specific business objectives.
Small business owners often have a love-hate relationship with social media. On the one hand, it can help build brand awareness and strengthen customer relationships. It can also produce leads and sales. That’s no doubt why 97 percent of Fortune 100 companies leverage social media, per Entrepreneur, and around 92 percent of midsize and large companies do too, according to Statista.
Yet, small businesses frequently struggle to get the same results their larger counterparts do. Some blame the time investment, while others say it’s just not a fit for their brand. So it’s no wonder that social media marketing adoption has historically been much lower for smaller companies than for others. At one point, nearly a quarter wasn’t using social media, per Clutch, let alone incorporating it into a comprehensive digital marketing plan.
The good news is that most brands can get results from platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, and X (formerly known as Twitter). First, however, you need a strong social media strategy that’s built around your company’s goals and designed from the ground up to produce ROI.
On this page, I’ll walk you through the different ways brands leverage social media today, how to create a tailored social media marketing strategy for a small business, and will provide some tips to help you get the best possible results.
Your Business Needs Social Media
When social media marketing and social media integration are done well, they offer a wealth of benefits for the organization and its customers.
It’s an Affordable Marketing Channel
In marketing, we often refer to the cost of advertising in terms of CPM, or cost per mille, the amount of money it takes to reach 1,000 people.
At a basic level, sharing your own content and curated content will have a CPM of pennies. It’s easy to do this for well under $1. That means businesses of any size and any budget can use social media to market and see a good ROI. Naturally, the larger your size and budget, the more mileage you can get from campaigns through things like boosted posts and ads.
In these cases, social media marketing has a CPM of under $10, with some options, like X, landing under $6. To be clear, this is targeted marketing, meaning your ad campaigns can be set up to reach only those who are likely to take action. So, although billboards, radio, and TV may fall close on the spectrum in cost, you’re paying to share your message with people who won’t be interested in your brand or products. Once you get into things that are targeted, like direct mailings, your CPM skyrockets to a minimum of $300.
In other words, it’s cost-effective; nothing comes close to social media in terms of affordability.
You Can Build Brand and Product Awareness with Ease
Roughly half the people who follow your brand will do so because they want to learn about new products and services, but it’s important to note that about the same number will unfollow if the content becomes irrelevant to them, and large swaths will leave if they see too many promotional posts or ads. To get people sharing your posts and thus giving your brand greater exposure and potentially growing followers, focus on brand awareness and creating posts that:
- Entertain
- Inspire
- Teach
These will get your foot in the door so that when you do share the occasional promotional post or mention a sale, your customer loyalty will ensure that followers will be engaged and listen.
Your Organization Becomes an Authority on Social Media
Being seen as an authority or subject matter expert means that even more people will come to rely on your organization as a solid source of information. It builds relationships and ultimately contributes to sales, too. As you post on social media and increase your social media presence, you organically create the perception that you’re the authority in your industry—and rightly so. You are.
It Lets You Engage with Your Audience on a Large Scale and One-on-One
The success of your social media marketing campaigns can be measured in a number of ways—likes, comments, shares, and overall engagement. This will help you identify if your current social media marketing strategy is working and let you test the effectiveness of new strategies on a large scale.
However, it’s important not to overlook opportunities to engage one-on-one with your fans and followers, too. Even if someone simply thanks you for posting a story, circle back and tell them you appreciate them reading or taking the time to comment. In the end, it’s these brief interactions that humanize your brand, build relationships, and improve brand loyalty.
Social Media Lets You Cultivate Authentic Experiences
“Authenticity” may sound like the buzzword of the day. After all, it really wasn’t something that was discussed much in marketing circles until millennials became consumers and brands realized they not only needed to stand for something but also remain consistent in their convictions in order to hold the attention and loyalty of younger audiences. Yet, newer research shows that it’s not merely millennials who demand authenticity. Overall, 85 percent of Gen-Xers and 80 percent of Baby Boomers consider the authenticity of a brand when deciding who to support too.
Being active on social media means you can steer your brand’s story and keep things moving in a positive direction by narrating the story your followers will share. When they do, roughly 60 percent of their friends and family will take their posts into consideration as they purchase too, making the benefits of social media marketing clear.
You Can Deliver Better Service Through Social Channels
Regardless of whether you’re present on social media or not, people will talk about your brand on social platforms. The difference is really in whether you have the visibility in order to turn their poor experiences into positive ones and their questions into answers.
Approximately 70 percent of consumers have used social media to resolve a customer service issue at least once. One in three prefers social media over other channels too. Perhaps the greatest business case is in the bottom line, though. When you engage with people and respond to them online, your customers will spend 20 to 40 percent more.
How to Create a Social Media Marketing Strategy in 6 Steps
Now that we’ve covered some of the basics, let’s look at the steps involved in creating a social media strategy.
Step 1: Define and Set Realistic Goals
Remember, all your digital marketing initiatives should contribute to reaching a business goal. From there, you can determine which metrics tie into that goal and set targets specific to marketing.
For instance, your company’s goal is to boost brand awareness. On social media, you can tell if your marketing is helping you reach your goal by measuring followers, likes, and subscribers. If your goal is to increase client retention, you might focus more on engagement metrics such as comments, post likes, and video views.
Before you set targets, consider where your brand stands today and what your team can reasonably achieve in a month or quarter based on the resources available and current strategy.
Step 2: Research and Understand Your Target Audience and Competitors
Social media is all about relationships. If you don’t know who you’re building a relationship with, you can’t hope to create a connection. Your business should already have buyer personas that can be used to guide your social media strategies. If not, create them and use them in all your marketing activities.
It’s also helpful to quickly examine what your competitors are doing. Check out which networks they use, how much engagement they’re getting, and if they’re leaving any gaps your business is poised to fill. If competitors have been around for some time and experimenting with social media marketing, their profiles will offer all sorts of insights about what your shared audience responds to. This will shorten your learning curve, so your initiatives are more effective right away.
Step 3: Figure Out Which Social Media Platforms Your Target Audience Uses
One reason why many small businesses get social media fatigue is because they try to do it all. Your brand does not need to be active on every social network. Put your resources to work where it makes the most sense. Make a list of all the social media platforms your brand could possibly use, then split it into three groups: primary, secondary, and unleveraged.
Primary Social Media Channels
Plan to spend around 80 to 90 percent of your time on your primary social media channels. These are the platforms your audience already uses and will give you the most ROI. For instance, most people can be found on Facebook. It spans all ages and demographics. It’s generally a good primary channel. LinkedIn also attracts a diverse audience but is geared toward professionals. It’s a good fit for most brands, too. If you have a very visual brand or sell physical products, a platform like Instagram may be ideal as well. Pinterest is roughly the same, but it skews toward a female audience and is more popular with the DIY crowd.
If you’re not sure which platforms to select, dig into your personas and analytics. It may also be helpful to see which ones your competitors are leveraging and getting the most engagement through.
Secondary Social Media Channels
No more than 20 percent of your time should be spent on your secondary social media channels. These are platforms that aren’t a perfect fit for your current audience but may help you reach a wider audience or connect with people who might become your customers later.
For instance, let’s say that your company offers a service geared towards retirees. Your best network will probably be Facebook. However, if you want to start building awareness with people before they hit retirement age, you might also spend some time on LinkedIn. That would be a secondary channel.
Unleveraged Social Media Channels
Some channels aren’t going to be a good fit for your brand, or leveraging them will drain your resources without delivering ROI. Of course, you should still claim your brand name on these channels for branding and trademarking purposes, and you’ll want to have some familiarity with them in case your audience or their behavior shifts, but you won’t use them regularly.
TikTok, for example, was almost exclusively used by teens a matter of years ago. Its earliest users are now adults, and the platform attracts a much larger age demographic these days. TikTok may not be the right platform for your business at the moment, but that doesn’t mean it, or another platform, won’t be a good fit as a primary or secondary channel in the future. Keep tabs on your unleveraged channels so it’s easier to pivot if and when it makes sense to do so.
X is Ideal for a Middle-Aged Audience
There are nearly 330 million active X users across the globe with the capacity to “tweet.” It attracts more than a third of those aged 13–29 and more than a quarter of those 30–49, with an audience that’s nearly an equal split between genders. Most tweet senders attended college, and nearly a third earn $75k per year or more, so it’s one of the better places to reach a professional audience. It may not be your best bet if you want to reach a rural or older audience, though.
Instagram Shines When You Need to Reach a Younger Audience
Instagram now has one billion active users worldwide. More than two-thirds of people 18–29 and almost half of those aged 30–49 use it. It’s particularly popular with women and girls and works well when you have lots of visual content to share relating to current trends and want to build relationships or reach a wide audience. However, it’s not the best for sales, particularly since you can’t include clickable links in your posts.
LinkedIn is Best for an Older Professional Audience
Even though LinkedIn doesn’t have the numbers X and Instagram do, with about 310 million active users, it’s where you want to be if you need to reach and conduct business with college-educated people and those in high-income brackets. It’s also where you want to be if you’re in B2B marketing, considering every single Fortune 500 company is represented on the platform.
Facebook Catches Everyone, Including Those 65+
The platform blows all other social media platforms out of the water with 2.26 billion active users and reaches people from virtually every demographic background. At least 50 percent of each age demographic uses Facebook, with the exception of those 65 and up. In this case, Facebook attracts 46 percent, but it leads the pack by an 8 percent margin anyway.
Other Social Networks May Be a Good Fit Too
Drill down your insights, social media analytics, consumer data, or any new audiences you want to reach, and do a demographic competitive analysis by network. You may find channels like Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, TikTok, Pinterest, and others are good fits for the audience you need to reach, too.
Step 4: Create a Social Media Content Plan
If you aren’t already using one, create a content calendar that covers all your content marketing efforts, including social media. This high-level overview makes it easy to weave themes together to ensure everything flows together. In addition, you’ll get more mileage from other pieces you’re creating and will solidify the core message with your audience that way.
During this stage, you should also hammer out how often you should be posting to each network and what kind of cadence to follow. For instance, networks like LinkedIn and Facebook have longer post lifespans, so you probably only need to post once or twice per day. The lifespan of a tweet is much shorter, so you may want to plan several posts per day. This is much easier if your company produces lots of evergreen content and your team habitually presents the same content in different ways.
Again, remember that your social media content strategy should tie back to the persona you’re targeting, the specific marketing targets you set, and company objectives. Choose mediums and tactics that align with the goals.
Social Media Strategy Examples
- Company Goal – Boost Brand Awareness: Increase reach on social media as measured by new followers. Potential tactics include contests, enhanced use of hashtags, sharing fun or educational content, and encouraging user-generated content.
- Company Goal – Increase Client Retention: Potential tactics include sharing content like product tips and tutorials, encouraging user-generated content from current clients, and product-related polls or surveys. Measure the effectiveness of posts with engagement and monitor client retention rates at a company level.
Step 5: Plan Your Execution
Whether you’re outsourcing social media marketing or keeping it in-house, you’ll likely have several people involved, and the work will be broken up into stages. For instance, your social media marketing manager may select the topics, then forward the ideas to a copywriter and/or graphic designer. There should be some form of approval or proofreading process, and someone will ultimately upload all your posts to a social media scheduling tool. Because of this, investing in a marketing project management tool makes it easy to assign tasks, track progress, and possibly even monitor time, which is a good idea.
Transfer the details from your content calendar to your project management tool and assign individual components as tasks to the appropriate person. Be sure to work out the timeline to allow for hiccups along the way and address any dependencies. For instance, if a planned post relates to a blog that isn’t created yet, double-check that it will be live in time for sharing. This is much easier when your content is created on a recurring content creation schedule.
Step 6: Monitor, Evaluate, and Improve Your Strategy for ROI
Lastly, it’s essential to review the results on a regular basis. On a granular level, your social media manager should know which posts are more popular, so you can duplicate successes. On a broader level, you should review key metrics at least monthly, confirm if you’re on track to meet goals, and adjust things to improve results when opportunities present themselves.
Use Free Social Media Tools to Streamline Your Workflow
Free social media tools can support a successful social media strategy by helping your social media team stay efficient and focused. These tools enable your team to manage multiple social media accounts, maintain consistent posting, and collaborate better, without adding to your budget. For small businesses, they provide structure and clarity without requiring complex systems.
Scheduling platforms like Buffer, Later, or Meta Business Suite allow you to plan posts across different social channels, keep your social media content calendar organized, and meet your social media marketing goals. Tools like Canva offer free design templates that simplify visual content creation for every type of content, helping your brand stand out while supporting an effective social media presence.
For social listening, tools such as Mention or the free version of Hootsuite give your team real-time insights into brand mentions, trends, and audience sentiment across major platforms. These insights can help your team respond faster and adjust your social strategy based on real-time engagement.
Used together, these tools contribute to a strategy that works, especially when you’re aiming to build a social media presence or refine your social media marketing without overspending.
Tips to Boost Engagement on Your Social Media Posts
By now, you should have a clearer idea of how to plan and deploy. Let’s take a quick look at some tips that can amplify your social media engagement strategy.
Keep Your Username Consistent Across All Channels
People will have a much easier time finding your brand and connecting with you when your username is the same everywhere you go.
Communicate with Authenticity
People can tell when a brand is paying lip service versus being authentic, and 90 percent say that authenticity is important when deciding which brands they like and support, according to Social Media Today. Make sure everyone who communicates on behalf of your company embodies the brand voice and behaves in a manner consistent with its values.
Make Your Posts Interactive
One of the best social media strategies to boost engagement is to make your content interactive. This includes things like:
- Polls and Surveys
- Contests
- Fill-in-the-Blank Questions
- Live Videos
- Calculators
Post Consistently
Plan out your posting days in advance and stick to the schedule outlined in your content calendar.
Use the Right Hashtags
Hashtags make your content more discoverable, but nearly half of all marketers don’t use them, according to HubSpot. Do some research to find out which ones are best for your brand, then include them in your bios and posts.
Be Visual
More than a third of people like to see brand content in video form, and nearly half like to see it in images, according to Statista. Catering to this preference directly translates to greater engagement. For example, LinkedIn posts get 98 percent more comments when they have images, the platform notes. Tweets are also three times more likely to get engagement when visual content is used, X reps say.
Make Sure Your Social Content Brings Value to Their Day
Whether you’re providing a laugh, giving a tip, or requesting their insights to improve your offerings, make sure each post you share delivers value to the reader. The greater the value, the more likely they will engage with and share your content.
Get Help Improving Your Social Media Strategy
As a digital marketing consultant with a background in business, I address social media strategy consulting from a holistic point of view. Social media isn’t a stand-alone component of digital marketing. It’s not even limited to marketing. It impacts everything from your SEO to your website and customer satisfaction and can also influence product development. When you master it, you’ll start to see positive changes across all areas of your business. I get to know each company I serve and build a strategy from the ground up, ensuring organizations get all the benefits from going social and can measure their success in a way that makes sense based on their business needs. If your social media marketing isn’t performing as it should, or you haven’t taken the plunge yet, I can help. Contact me for a complimentary consultation.
FAQs About Social Media Strategy
How often should a social media strategy be reviewed and updated?
A social media strategy should be reviewed at least once a month at the metric level, with a broader strategic review every quarter. Platform algorithms, audience behavior, and content formats shift regularly, and strategies that are not updated lose effectiveness over time. Monthly reviews also help identify which post types and topics are driving the most engagement so those can be prioritized.
How do you measure the ROI of social media marketing?
Measuring the ROI of social media marketing starts with tying your social metrics to specific business goals set before the campaign begins. Follower counts and likes are surface indicators; stronger ROI signals include website traffic from social channels, lead form completions, customer inquiries traced to social touchpoints, and repeat purchases among customers who engage with your content.
Does a small business need to be active on every social media platform?
Small businesses do not need to be active on every social media platform. Spreading resources too thin across multiple networks is one of the most common reasons small business social media efforts underperform. A more effective approach is to identify the one or two platforms where your target audience is most active and concentrate the majority of your time and content there.
How should a business respond to negative comments on social media?
Negative comments on social media should be addressed promptly, professionally, and publicly where possible, since other users will see both the complaint and the response. Acknowledging the issue, apologizing where warranted, and moving the resolution to a private channel demonstrates accountability and can turn a poor customer experience into a positive brand impression for everyone watching.
Husam Jandal
Husam Jandal is an internationally renowned business and marketing consultant and public speaker with a background that includes training Google Partners, teaching e-business at a master’s level, receiving multiple Web Marketing Association Awards, and earning a plethora of rave reviews from businesses of all sizes.
