Social media is a crucial channel for marketers to leverage to grow their audience. But creating a successful social media strategy is no easy process. You need to do your research and understand who you’re talking to and what will resonate with them before developing content. Auditing your social media starts with a few key questions:

Who Is Following You on Social?

You may think you know who your audience is, but without hard data you could be mistaken. Use in-app and third-party analytics tools to figure out who is actually following and engaging with your account. Focus on demographics like age, gender and location to build a more complete picture of your current audience. Then ask yourself - does this match my initial assumption? If so, then your content is on target. If not, adjust your content to better resonate with your target audience.

What Is Your Top-Performing Content?

Look at key social metrics (likes, comments impressions and reach) to determine your most successful posts. Identify consistent themes or trends among these top performers. Maybe they feature the same product, use the same filter or have funnier captions.

Once you pinpoint what gets your audience engaged, you can double down on those tactics in future posts.

What Are the Best Practices?

Each social channel has its own set of best practices. Get as familiar as possible with those that apply to the platforms you use most. Below, we’ve outlined the top-line best practices to keep in mind when creating content for Facebook and Instagram.

• Instagram
• High-quality visual content
• Stick to a theme and filter to create a cohesive brand image
• Captions should be clear and concise and capture the brand’s essence
• Use branded hashtags consistently
• The optimal number of hashtags is 11
• Facebook
• Facebook prioritizes video content and “genuine community engagement” (meaning videos with a high volume of comments and threads)
• Captions should not exceed the first three lines (ideally 40-80 characters)
• Include questions in your post copy (posts with questions have a 92% higher comment rate)
• If you include a link in your copy, make sure to add a CTA and a UTM tag to track traffic to your site

Who Are Your Competitors and What Are They Doing?

Keep a pulse on your direct competitors, industry competitors or aspirational accounts that engage both your current and target audiences. To identify these competitors, look for accounts with high audience affinity to your account. Use a tool like Tagger to look at your competitor's audience demographics, their top performing content, current campaigns and influencer activations.

Tagger also aggregates accounts with high audience affinity to your account. This means you may have as many as 95% of the same followers, so what’s working for them will likely work for you.

Just like you did for your own posts, determine common themes of your competitors' successful posts and find unique ways to incorporate those tactics into your social content.

Conclusion

Social media is always growing and changing. Even if you have an established brand you should continue to audit your social media strategy on a regular basis. Learn from your mistakes and find areas of opportunity for a successful social strategy!

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