Social Media Strategy Guide

Goals

• What is the purpose of your social media presence? e.g. to drive more traffic to website, increase awareness, spread a message, equip audiences with resources, etc. 

Measurable Objectives

• Set objectives (e.g. increase mentions by 50% in 6 months, increase donations by x amount, etc.)
• Quantify your progress export analytics for each social media platform monthly (or weekly, depending on your goals) and track the things that are important for your objectives. Adjust your online presence according to what the analytics show to be working best. 

Who is your audience?

• Create an audience persona (or multiple, depending on your audience). How old is this person? Gender? What interests and motivates them, etc.
• If you have multiple demographics, create a persona to represent each.
• What do you want them to do next? What is your desired consequence from your audience? 

What are others doing?

• Have a look at (both successful and unsuccessful) social media platforms of organisations/churches that have a similar audience to you (or similar to your ideal audience).
• Take screenshots of these social media pages, analyse what types of posts they make (for example, a church posting content relating to the building, the people or advertising events) and record which create the most engagement from their audience, then use this information to learn from the mistakes and successes of others. 

Build a content plan

• All content needs to align with your overall message and be appropriate for the platform that its posted on.
• Using multiple types of media is the most effective way to post: mix of images, videos, graphics, etc. to encourage more engagement.
• How will this content be continually created? Who will be responsible for creating, collating and scheduling it? Deliver fresh content on a regular basis.
• Retweeting/sharing content produced by others which is relevant to your audience is also a good way to encourage engagement.
• Sharing old content is also a good idea - sharing old content is better than not posting. 

Interaction

• How do you want to interact with your audience? Do you want your organisation to have a particular voice?
• Interaction with your audience is the key to post engagement - reply, retweet, like, comment, share content from others and tag relevant accounts in your own content.
• Write each post as though youre talking directly to someone - posts are read by people individually; if they feel like theyre being talked to as an individual it tends to connect with them more. 

Posting

• Scheduling posts decide how frequently you want to post to each platform.
• Always schedule posts in-app where possible (the only place this isnt possible is Instagram, Planoly is a good application to use for this. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube all have in-app scheduling features).
• Include some form of visual element to each post wherever possible.
• Include a clear call to action at the end of each post (even if its just read more at…)