Content strategy vs social media strategy: Which is right for your business?

Should you be doing a content strategy for your business … or a social media strategy?

A lot of people come to me to say, “Hey, I need a social media strategy, can you help me?”

And of course I can help, but then we get to a point: If you’re going to create a social strategy, there’s a fair bit involved but at the heart of it, lies content.

If you go down the path of developing a social media strategy for your business, you’re going to have to pull up stumps pretty quickly unless you can effectively tackle the question: What sort of content are we going to be publish?

So, really you need to do a content strategy first … focus on becoming your own media channel.

That’s the way I’m going to be thinking anyway: you do a content strategy first for your owned media channels that can then morph into your earned media efforts and also your social media.

{I explain more in the video below}

And of course, then you’re going to need to know your communications goals and how they support your overarching commercial goals: What are you trying to achieve?

You’re going to have to know your audiences really, really well, but also the people who influence them. There might be content you have to create for influencers as well.

That’s obviously just a starting point. There’s a lot to it!

And of course, in developing a social media strategy, you’ll need to go off into different areas such as customer care (particularly if you’re a consumer-facing brand) and personal branding for the senior leadership (i.e. if you’re part of a bigger organisation: what are your senior executives doing from a content perspective on social media?).

So if you’re ever confronted with the task of developing a social media strategy for your business or the organisation you work for, I recommend you first focus on your content strategy and that, in turn, will naturally dovetail nicely into your broader social plan.