EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW TO BUILD A SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY | WORLD SOCIAL MEDIA DAY 2025

“Social media is the ultimate equaliser. It gives a voice and a platform to anyone willing to engage.”

Amy Jo Martin

Having now been blogging for over twelve years (it’ll actually be thirteen in January!) I have developed a huge passion and interest in the communications and marketing industry. This is why I’ve now had a number of voluntary roles in that sector – with my new one being announced on my start date of July 8^th – as well as having also completed a number of online courses relevant to it too. Over the years, my career experience, and education, I’ve learned how to create Strategies in this industry: particularly around marketing and branding, but I’ve also picked up how to create a Social Media Strategy and I thought with today being National Social Media Day, it was the perfect opportunity to share this knowledge and understanding…

What Is A Social Media Strategy & Why Create One?

In the communications and marketing industry in general, it’s often important to put a lot of thought into something before just going ahead and doing it. Knowing and establishing why you’re creating content, can be essential to determining exactly what you create. A Social Media Strategy is the perfect example of this because it is a way of creating a plan and a guide to achieve your general communications goals and objectives.

It can also be important to have a Strategy because each of the main social media platforms (which I’d sum up as being Instagram, Facebook, and X/Twitter) provide a really different forum for a whole variety of people who have equally varied interests, behaviours, and tendencies e.g. Instagram is more about the visuals and aesthetics. Creating a Social Media Strategy, can aid you in ensuring you utilise the correct platform for your needs, principles, and aspirations and that you use it to create the best and more effective content possible.

Step 1: Create Goals

Goals in a Social Media Strategy, are typically centred around statistics and aiming for a particular account on a platform to reach a certain number of followers or have a particular percentage of engagement rates. Key examples or thoughts on different goals would be raising brand awareness, boosting engagement, generating leads, growing website traffic, increase following, and the optimisation of paid-for ads. When creating goals for your Social Media Strategy, you should use the SMART framework:

S: Specific

This first step is what it needed to ensure that your goals are clear and concise instead of being too vague or broad. Being vague, provides the opportunity for a goal to be misunderstood and for mistakes to be made where a person had assumed or perceived a goal to mean one thing, when it may very well have actually been intended to mean the complete opposite! Bits which are essential to consider here are around what and who will be needed to make your goal a reality and why it is valuable and necessary to your organisation or brand etc.

M: Measurable

If a goal isn’t measurable, you can’t establish whether you’re on the right track to achieving it or whether you’re too far off and should be making changes in order to act in a more accurate and relevant way. The important bits to consider this time, are around the data you’ll need to indicate where you are in achieving the goal and how you’ll secure or find that data, what reasonable milestones could be set towards the goal, and how you could or would even establish whether or not you’ve actually met your goals.

A: Achievable

Your goals must always be attainable and realistic because without having this quality – if your goal is far-fetched or unreachable – you may find yourself consistently and constantly feeling unsatisfied or insufficient. It’s therefore important that your goal is within your capabilities because this can also bring a sense of motivation to yourself and – where relevant – others on the Team who recognise they’re able to contribute to the goal. Things to consider for this part of the framework would be around how much control you can have over whether this goal is achieved and what the precedent is.

R: Relevant

Whilst this is slightly similar to the previous element of the SMART framework, relevance here is all about having your goals be consistent and in keeping with other Strategies or official documents you may have e.g. a Business Plan or broader Communications and Marketing Strategies. Consideration for this part, should be around why this is the goal now and wasn’t previously, how it will advance things long-term, and what it would mean if this goal wasn’t achieved.

T: Time-Bound

This final element of the goal-creating technique is centred around the idea that a lot of communications and marketing efforts and work revolve around frequency – especially social media and the topic of how often you publish content. This can be a crucial element to affecting and or having an impact on your account or platform’s popularity and engagement rates. Areas of consideration that are important here, are around the longest and shortest time possible for the goal to still be achievable, what has been accomplished in a similar timeframe previously, and what would happen if things were off-track half-way through the time you’ve set/dedicated.

My Experiences

A little while into my blogging career, I was still an inpatient of a psychiatric hospital (as I was when I created, I’m NOT Disordered) and I was talking with the staff and another inpatient about the number of views I had. Another girl who was there who also had a small and very casual blog, asked me why ‘the numbers’ mattered so much to me. In all honesty, it felt like a bit of a dig at the thought that perhaps I was being superficial or ingenuine in some way by always noticing and celebrating the number of readers my blog has. Eventually, however, I became grateful for her asking that because it helped me to establish my motivation for caring about the number of readers my blog has and it’s about two things:

1. Each ‘number’ is actually a person – a person who I now have the opportunity to help because they’re reading my content.

2. Collaborations and opportunities are typically earned and dependent upon the size of your readership.

In developing this understanding of my motivation, I also became confident and able to establish relevant goals in my blogging career. A lot of them over the years, have been very obviously and understandably about reaching the next milestone in my reader count, but others have included wanting to work with particular people, brands, charities, and organisations and to be afforded more once-in-a-lifetime opportunities.

Step 2: Audience Identification & Consideration

Identifying numerous elements to your audience – singularly and on the whole – can be really important to building an accurate and successful Social Media Strategy. Elements to consider establishing could be:

ü Basic Demographics e.g. age, location, occupation

ü Interests

ü Behaviours

ü Lifestyle

ü Goals and Challenges

ü Marketing Tendencies

To really establish a good understanding and develop true knowledge and appreciation for your target audience, you could utilise tools like basic surveys – traditional or digital – or programs like Google Analytics. And in a bid to be creative here, you could try to create Personas – which are typically used in businesses, especially retail brands and companies – which can involve creating profiles including the above information, but for ‘imaginary’ people who could be potential followers or customers. A format for creating a Persona, could be a simple table/form which might – in addition to the above information – also include a name, income, education level, motivations, and attitudes toward relevant topics and issues. There are also a few links at the end of this blog post, with one in particular which might prove useful for this exact part of the content.

My Experiences

When I began blogging, it was mostly about the therapeutic value I experienced myself, but then there was also some focus and mind paid to the thought of how my content could impact my friends, family, and loved ones. I considered – and hoped – that it would aid them in two things:

1. The ability to better understand my experiences and my journey which might not only aid the support they provide me, but also anyone else in their life who is struggling with their mental health.

2. The confidence and reassurance to speak up for help and support themselves if they also began to struggle with their own mental health.

Obviously now that I’m NOT Disordered’s audience is so huge (almost 2.4 million of you lovely people), I absolutely recognise and accept that my content is being read by people who I – most likely – will never actually even know the name of, let alone be able to meet them! And so, I felt a sense of a loss of control and of the idea that I knew who I was ‘talking to’ in my posts. I’ve had to recognise that this means I sometimes need to be more ‘careful’ and ‘aware,’ especially in terms of the wording I might choose to use in phrasing something or the way in which I recount a situation. Politically correct. I have to really ensure there’s an element of that in my content because I realise that the size of my audience means there are people of all sorts of lifestyles reading it and not everyone will agree with or appreciate the same thing. I do try to look at this positively though and see it as a way in which I can be more creative and varied in the content I create.

Step 3: Choosing Platforms

This part of your Strategy is all about determining which social media platforms will provide the best and the most access to your content reaching your target audience. Deciding upon a platform is largely dependent upon the type of content and which group of your target audience you are considering e.g. if you have a research study, that would typically be aimed at professionals, and they are mostly users of LinkedIn and – particularly the medical industry – Twitter/X. However, if you had a room tour to publish, then that would likely be better placed on Instagram or YouTube where videography is a typical or frequent format of the content posted.

Important considerations to pay attention to in selecting a platform in addition to the format of your content and the platforms your audience use, can also include:

1. Your goals for using social media

2. The resources available (team members and their knowledge, as well as financial resources)

3. Your industry

4. How you will manage it e.g. will be using a scheduling tool e.g. Hootsuite

My Experiences

I did literally no research in blogging before creating I’m NOT Disordered! I mean, all I really knew was that there was Blogger and WordPress as my options for blogging from and from my knowledge of it, I felt that WordPress was too complicated for my level of understanding and abilities and so I created an account on Google (who own Blogger). This is actually something which I always recommend budding Bloggers don’t do! I always suggest that people do their research into determining which platform to use and – more importantly, in my opinion – that you do your research into what you’re getting yourself into (blogging, in this instance). I try to encourage others to create pros and cons lists about the industry before making that final decision to create a blog. I just always think that in doing so, you could be better prepared for the ups and downs that can come with this career; and that level of preparation is a quality which I massively wish I’d had (I didn’t even brainstorm my blog’s title – that’s how lacking I was in this quality!) because I get the largest feeling that I’ve truly had to learn things the hard way.

Step 4: Develop a Content Plan

This Step requires a couple of actions or areas of consideration, but all of them are massively connected and, in some ways and instances, they actually run into each other and alongside one another too.

The first is to decide upon content themes which must align with your brand’s values, goals, and the interests of your target audience. That can lend itself to another action around thinking on using a mix of formats for your content because with the various themes can come a different standard or precedent e.g. if the content is around interior design, you’re not going to get a page of copy (text) in a blog post/article on your website. If you want to feature a Q&A however, that could then be done in multiple formats and choosing which one you use should really be dependent upon your target audience’s interests and preferences. There are four core content types:

1. Entertainment

2. Education

3. Promotion

4. Inspiration

You should use these types at a frequency that is appropriate to your audience and in a combination that will be appealing and attractive to both maintain your following and build upon it. But it’s also worth keeping research statistics in mind too:

· 500 million people browse Instagram Stories every day, so videos are the most popular type of content on this platform.

· Videos are also more popular on Facebook with the top 500 posts featuring a video and users tending to avoid content with links.

· On Twitter/X, there’s a 55% larger rate of engagement for tweets which utilise imagery: whether that’s a photograph or a GIF!

· The most popular and viewed content on LinkedIn are typically posts with one multimedia embed such as a single image or video.

In considering your audience’s preferences in relation to the mix and theme of your content, you can roll into the third consideration around content planning in this Stage of the Strategy creation, which is the frequency of which to publish content. Your answer to that, should mostly depend upon the frequency which your audience typically likes to see – you can figure this out through competitive research analysis in finding accounts for other organisations or Influencers in your industry and considering how often they post. In this element, you can also go so far as to consider the time of day that you post too – this can very easily be determined by trial and error on your own account too, but also through general knowledge of the free time when your target audience are likely to have the opportunity to be online.

My Experiences

Using different content is one of my favourite elements to being a blogger and utilising social media because I really enjoy being creative. I also absolutely love to create content that no one would expect or that others might not even think of doing! And I feel that the internet gives you the opportunity to develop that ability and the skill to be able to do that – and to be good at doing so too!

I think it would be fair to say that my blog has become more visual since I learnt about the existence of Canva – a creative, graphic-creating marketing tool/website – in my Digital Marketing Internship way back in 2017! Since learning about Canva and how to use a lot of its features – though I always say that I 100% feel that every time I log onto it, I discover a new function(!) – I think that I’ve added a lot more imagery to my blog posts which, previously, were all about the copy (text) and only very occasionally featured GIFs or images from Pinterest which weren’t even in anyway edited to fit with the blog’s aesthetic etc. I now use Canva at least once in every blog post because I design the blog post’s title graphic on Canva and then, whether I use Canva later/throughout the post, really depends upon the post itself and how appropriate or suitable it is to feature further graphics or imagery.

Step 5: Engagement

Practicing good skill and technique in engaging with your audience – whether they are followers or just people who have engaged with your content in some way – can be important to your Social Media Strategy for a number of reasons:

1. Enhances Brand Visibility

2. Builds Trust and Brand Loyalty

3. Improves Traffic and Conversions

4. Provides Insight into Your Audience Behaviours

5. Strengthen Brand Voice

6. Enhances SEO Performance

There are then a number of ways in which you can encourage and increase the chance of interaction and engagement from your audience via your social media platforms and the content you publish on them:

1. Create High Quality Content

2. Publish Content Consistently

3. Utilise User-Generated Content (UGC): this can be through creating brand-oriented hashtags.

4. Engage in Two-Way Conversations: this can be done by responding to DM’s in a timely fashion.

5. Tailor Content To Each Platform

6. Use Interactive Elements e.g. host a competition on Instagram or run a poll on Twitter/X.

7. Monitor and Follow Trends

8. Utilise Organic and Paid Ads/Content

Finally, the key metrics and statistics to keep an eye on (and which you can find on Twitter Analytics and Instagram Insights) in order to monitor and evaluate your levels of engagement on social media are:

· Engagement Rate

· Comments and Replies

· Shares and Saves

· Direct Messages (DM’s)

· Clicks

My Experiences

When I first started blogging, the comment feature on all of my content was open and available and I received some absolutely amazing, lovely, supportive comments and feedback; but I also received two horrible ones. And, as with lots of things in life, that negativity outweighed all the positivity and ended up encouraging me to actually close I’m NOT Disordered down completely! And I did – for a month or so at the backend (September/October) of 2014. I ended up being incredibly grateful for that instance because it taught me just how passionate I was about blogging and just how beneficial it is for me and for my mental health in particular.

Step 6: Allocate Resources

This part of the Strategy is particularly for larger organisations who have full Communications and Marketing Department teams and/or who have funding – so, a solo Blogger like me, wouldn’t benefit in any way from this Step of the Strategy (hence why there’ll be no ‘My Experience’ at the end of it!).

As I sort of said, allocating resources includes both assigning team members or others in the organisation with duties and responsibilities that are relevant for the social media of the organisation, as well as allocating funding and budgeting finances towards your social media efforts and work.

Typically, assigning social media roles to others would include not necessarily assigning one channel to individual people but, instead, assigning particular campaigns to individuals. For instance, larger Awareness Dates e.g. Mental Health Awareness Week because this would demand or lead to an expectation of good quality, regular, and consistent content every day for one week. This can be an enormous workload in a large organisation where there is a huge social media following and therefore more pressure and a far higher standard of expectation.

Typically, financial costs in social media would involve paid advertorials – particularly on Facebook – or post ‘boosts’ as it is referred to on Instagram when you pay money in order to have your content appear on more timelines than your followers and a small amount of the general public. And it would appear in a higher position on those timelines.

Another cost with social media work, could be in so far as subscriptions for variously helpful programmes and digital tools that would prove beneficial to your content creation. These could range from paid plans for creation websites such as Canva to subscriptions with content scheduling websites such as Hootsuite and Buffer.

Step 7: Monitor, Analyse, Evaluate, and Optimise

On websites where advice is given or templates are available for creating a Social Media Strategy, the above words are actually broken into two or three sections, but I felt that all four of them are massively related and really flow to one another. So, I combined all four for this final Step of the Strategy.

Monitoring is typically meaning to keep an eye on the metrics, the engagement rates, and the general statistics of your social media content – a lot of platforms have their own, built-in monitoring tools e.g. there is ‘Twitter Analytics’ and Instagram has ‘Insights.’ There’s also Google Analytics though this is typically for monitoring the metrics of websites (and so it’s the one I use for I’m NOT Disordered’s audience demographics because Blogger typically only supplies the statistics in terms of views and the location of the views).

Metrics which are important to monitor are the engagement rate, likes and – for Facebook – reactions, comments, shares, reach, impressions, social share of voice (SSoV: which refers to mentions of your organisation or brand), conversion rate, click-through rate (CTR), cost per click (CPC), follower count, follower growth, audience demographics e.g. age and location etc, view count, video completion rate, watch time, response time, and customer satisfaction scores.

To analyse these metrics etc. means to examine them methodically and in detail in order to be able to understand and interpret them. Doing this, should then lend itself to the evaluation and optimisation part so that you use the conclusion of your analysis to develop an evaluation which you can then take on board and learn from to optimise your work and the content you create and publish in the future.

My Experiences

I have learnt so much over the years through trial and error. There are so many instances where I’ve created content that I have 100% felt happy with myself but haven’t 100% been sure that my readers would like it that much too. In those situations, I’ve really just prioritised myself and remembered that the reason I started blogging in the first place was all about the therapeutic benefit writing and creating content had for me and my mental health. This helped me to stay strong and motivated if something went wrong and I was faced with a huge dip in my blog’s view count and a decrease in its popularity.

An example recently of me analysing my content and the impact of it is from when I posted on my blog’s Instagram (@imnotdisordered) content (this one, to be exact!) which, at the end of the set of eight graphics it is made up of, pointed followers to the blog’s Help Directory. So, I decided to look at the stats on Blogger which illustrated the most popular page on I’m NOT Disordered and saw that – for the first time since creating it – that Help Directory was now the second (to the home page) most popular one! This really proved that the link to it on the Instagram post was not only working but proving to be successful in popularity too. From that though, I’m planning to create more content pointing to other pages to see if these have the same impact/effect on the stats too.