Examples of Social Media Strategies That You Can Use for Your Clients
As a social media strategist, you never want to be at a loss to help your clients. Should they want to try something new or expand their reach to new audiences, you need to have new ideas ready to brainstorm.
And social media marketing is about so much more than just posting interesting content or nice-looking pictures. You need to have solid strategies in place so you can know how to accomplish specific results that your brand or your client is looking for.
Let’s take a look at 16 tried-and-true examples of social media strategies that can help you drive real results.
Why You Should Never Take a Single Strategy Approach
It’s nearly impossible at this stage of the social media game to focus on a single strategy and stay successful. Some brands remain entirely focused on growth or engagement to the point that they fail to recognise how these can all be interconnected, never mind that businesses rarely need to achieve just one metric. They want a larger engaged audience that buys more, not just a bigger audience that does nothing or only succeeds in getting their existing audience to comment more. You need all the rungs.
Here we’ll outline a few different ideas you can keep on hand so that you can create a diverse, expansive, and increasingly effective social media marketing strategy . Note that there will be plenty of overlap between the strategies, so some may serve more than one purpose.
4 Examples of Growth Strategies for Social Media
Growth strategies are a must for any social media campaign, but not in isolation. How can you grow your following and help them along to the next stage of the sales funnel?
These four examples of social media strategies for growth are a solid start.
1. Social Media Contests
Social Media contests are obviously great for engagement and growth, but they also go a long way towards attracting new followers and motivating them to not just follow but engage
You have a number of software options for running your contest, like Shortstack, Wishpond, or Vyper. They can help you not only capture user engagement with things like photo submissions, but you can get their email addresses, too. It’s an effective social growth and lead generation strategies.
You can require people to follow your accounts in order to enter the contest, which can help growth.
You can also encourage users to submit their own photo or caption a picture and share it on their social media, tagging your accounts. This method ensures that even more people see it through their friend’s socials, which can also help your accounts grow further.
2. Partnering With Other Brands
Partnerships with beloved brands often make for the most engaging growth strategies because it forces both brands to get creative for an eye catching contest.
Partnering up with known brands gives you instant credibility with your partner’s audience, builds trust in not just their audience but also your existing one.
Small businesses can take advantage of this strategy, too, even if they aren’t widely known. They likely have local followings, and promoting both products and brands at once (and potentially selling them together, like one brand’s delicious cookies that pair with another’s excellent drinks!) can drive social media follower boosts for both.
3. Host “Account Takeovers”
The account takeover is a very popular growth strategy. It involves someone not directly related to the brand (typically an influencer or partner brand) who creates content that you post on their behalf to your account in a “takeover.”
It should be specified in the agreement that the individual will promote the takeover on their accounts, and they create content to post on your accounts for a set period around a certain theme.
These are especially great for behind-the-scenes type events or “A Day in the Life of” campaigns. Takeovers are not only a great way to grow your brand, but also breathe new life into a social media feed or fill a lull in your brand’s programming or employee’s vacation time. It doesn’t hurt that your own team gets to take a day off from creating content, too!
4. Being Search- & Discoverability-Friendly
This might seem obvious, but remaining search-friendly and discoverable can sometimes be an afterthought rather than part of your strategy as a whole. You don’t want this to be the case, because it can prevent you from capturing low-hanging fruit in terms of audience members who are actively searching for you.
Be sure to consider the key phrases people might use to find brands like yours on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. People tend to employ slightly different search terms or phrasing depending on the platform, so adjust accordingly. And remember to collect Facebook reviews; it can help with search visibility.
Content on Instagram, especially Reels, also has amazing discoverability features. If your brand is only posting on its main Feed and not Stories or Reels, there’s a whole world of new audiences you might be missing.
You can also use popular or trending hashtags on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter; evergreen hashtags for general topics and seasonal, event, or holiday-specific hashtags to catch the moments. A great element of a social media strategy is always to create content that brings users to you through their questions.
Growth Strategies Not to Use
We’ve all heard some of these ideas, and sometimes a client will throw it out there as something they’ve heard will increase growth quickly and easily. It’s up to us to calmly explain why these strategies are outdated or were never good plans to begin with:
- Follow for follow. This doesn’t actually work in most cases, and if it does you’re only getting followers from people who care about their own follower account and not your content. They won’t engage, and will likely stop following you shortly after you reciprocate. It also signals to other users that your following may be less than legit.
- Buying followers. It’s fairly easy for a mildly social media-savvy customer to suss out a brand that buys followers. A quick scroll shows few fleshed-out profiles and engagements will always remain low. Whereas in the early days of social media, buying followers might have been part of a strategy, nowadays it’s just a sign that you aren’t as genuine as you might seem.
- Using “follower” software to grow. Most of the time, the followers you might gain from such software will stand out as bought followers for the reasons outlined above. But primarily, you don’t want your brand to engage in such practices because it looks bad if anyone takes a close look, shows a disingenuity with your brand, and the short-term payoff is never as good as the long-term, more organic growth you could focus on instead.
4 Examples of Engagement Strategies for Social Media
Visibility algorithms depend heavily on engagement, and an engaged follower is more likely to convert to a paid customer and is more likely to see your content moving forward. Keep these ideas handy during your strategy meetings to ensure you include all of the foundations for excellent brand engagement.
1. Create Valuable Resources
It’s tried and true in the social media world: give people the information they need and you’ll get saves; present it in an easy to read infographic, and your audience will reward you with shares. Present your brand as the go-to palace for helpful hacks around your product to create content people need, their friends love, and they will engage.
2. Ask for Follower Opinions
People love to tell you their opinion, and even better if it’s multiple choice. That could be why polls are such a popular social media engagement strategy. Even something as simple as ”what do you think” about x will spark someone’s imagination and encourage them to engage. Polls are available on a number of different platforms, including Twitter and Instagram Stories.
You can capture user feedback by asking “What do you love, Grey walls or bright walls?” or “what’s your favourite flavour?” Opinions are such an easy way to build engagement fast that you’ll want to integrate it regularly into your strategy. Make sure that you’re testing how your audience responds to open-ended questions like “What’s your favourite flavour” vs “this or that” questions like “Grey or bright walls” so you can create stronger engagement-focused posts in the future.
3. Engage With Your Audience
The best way to invite engagement is to engage yourself, even when replying to negative comments (this is important in its own right).
Keep the conversation going.
And as a bonus, some platforms like Facebook will show when someone’s friend engages on a Page’s feed, which can help with growth and brand awareness.
4. Go Live
Facebook has a live video feature that does insanely well; it should absolutely be part of your engagement and growth strategy.
You can schedule the live ahead of time, tie it to a Facebook Event, promote and boost it, and get started! People love getting to ask questions in real time, and once it’s over, you can share the video and promote it all over again.
Brand Awareness Strategies for Social Media
1. Tell Your Brand’s Story Through Video
2. Add Brand Logos or Use Brand Colors In Images
3. Run UGC (User Generated Content) Campaigns
4. Create a Branded Hashtag
Final Thoughts
As you can see, brands are at no loss for interesting methods of aligning growth, engagement, and sales. Choose the methods that work best for you and that you believe will be most effective with your target audience.
All of these strategies can be customised and adapted, scaled up or down. There’s endless flexibility, which is why they’re the strongest social media strategies you can start with.