Looking for tips on how to create a social media strategy? You’ve come to the right place. A well-crafted social media strategy can help you to connect with your target audience, amplify your brand’s message, and increase your business’s revenue. Here’s our 6-step social media strategy framework and how to adapt it for your executive social media activation.
Step 1: Set Goals
- Big Picture Goals.
Decide which marketing or business-level goals your executives will support with their social media presence so you can account for this. Likely, they’ll be laddering to a larger brand-building and thought leadership goals already in motion. - Program-specific Goals.
Set goals for your executives’ social media management program overall — how do they want to come across? What does success look like for their reach or follower growth? What’s the long-term vision for their thought leadership and personal brand? For instance, will this parlay into an episodic video series, a podcast tour, or something else? - Activity-Based Goals.
Finally, you’ll want to set more specific, activity-based goals for the program’s first three, six, and twelve months. How often will they post weekly, publish videos, or respond to inbound comments?
Step 2: Define the Audience
Now that you have some goals, it’s time to clarify who your executives will be speaking to.
Define two to three groups of ideal users that your executive social media strategy will target. Here are a few ideas:
- Current Employees:
Particularly if you have a large company, this is a chance for your executives to share industry knowledge with and show appreciation for the people who make up their brand. - Existing Customers:
Creating content for the customers you already have is just as important as (if not more important than) reaching new, potential customers. That’s true for the company accounts and the executives’. - Key Prospects:
You still want to reach new customers, though, and social selling is a solid way to do that. - Future Recruits and Industry Peers:
Thought leadership from your C-suite team makes your brand look good both to talented people who might want to work there and industry peers (such as contractors, brands, other thought leaders, etc.) who might want to partner with you.
Step 3: Choose Your Channels.
Where will your executives focus their attention? LinkedIn is a safe bet for B2B, but this decision will differ based on two key areas:
- Audience concentration:
Where can they best reach and influence their desired audience? - Personal comfort level:
Which platforms do they primarily use, enjoy, or avoid?
And remember, more platforms require more effort and coordination. Consider one to two to start with and expand from there.
During this step, you’ll also want to map out which features the execs will use on each channel. For instance, LinkedIn isn’t just one thing; it’s
- LinkedIn feed posts
- LinkedIn Stories
- LinkedIn Live
- LinkedIn Articles
Step 4: Plan the Content
You know why, where, and to whom the execs will be talking. Time to focus on the “what.”
What kind of content will they be producing?
First, consider the format. Because executive social media programs can be highly individual, you need to know the executives preferred forms of communication.
For an executive who prefers to appear unscripted on camera, you might add a few live streams to their rotation of social media posts. Another executive might prefer to express themself through long-form, written content, which would lend itself well to LinkedIn Articles or maybe thoughtful Twitter threads. You get the idea.
Next, you’ll want to consider the content themes the executives will tackle. To save time, consider an episode or pillar-content approach and align your executive social media content management with the corporate, editorial calendar.
